Consultation Participants - Privacy notices by service area

Hartlepool Borough Council (HBC) is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.

This privacy notice is issued in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and describes how we collect and use personal information about you to administer online and face-to-face consultation activities. The information is used so that the Council can collect and analyse information about Council services to help improve and develop services in the future.

This notice applies to information we hold about you.

We may update this notice at any time.

It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information. 

HBC is a “data controller”. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice. 

In order for us to provide and maintain your account on our digital consultation system we will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

• Your real name
• Your username
• Your email address  
• Your age or date of birth (as confirmation that you are old enough to use the platform)

Depending on the nature of the consultation activity you take part in, we may also collect, store and use the following categories of personal information about you:

• Your postcode or street address
• Your use of Council services 

We may also collect, store and use the following “special categories” of more sensitive personal information:

This will be dependent on the nature of the consultation, but may include:  

• Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and gender identity
• Information about your political opinions
• Information about your physical or mental health, including any medical condition or disability
• Your use of Council services where this could constitute “special category” data such as use of health or benefits services. 

We collect personal information when you create an account on our digital consultation and engagement platform or take part in a consultation activity (online or face-to-face). 

We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

(a) where you have given clear consent for us to process your personal data for this specific purpose

and

(b) for processing, special category data, where you have provided explicit consent to the processing of your personal data for this specific purpose.

We need all the categories of information in the list above (see what personal information we collect above) primarily to allow us to administer your account on the digital consultation platform and to analyse data from consultation activities to help inform policy development and improve council services.

The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below.  

Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be more than one ground which justifies our use of your personal information.

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, you will not be able to create an account on our digital consultation platform and may not be able to have your views considered as part of the consultation activity. 

We will only use your personal information for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law. 

We do not need your consent if we use special categories of your personal information in accordance with our written policy to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights as required by law. In limited circumstances, we may approach you for your written consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If we do so, we will provide you with full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent. 

Automated decision making

Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention. We are allowed to use automated decision-making in the following circumstances:

1. Where we have notified you of the decision and given you 21 days to request a reconsideration.
2. Where it is necessary to perform the contract with you and appropriate measures are in place to safeguard your rights.
3. In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent and where appropriate measures are in place to safeguard your rights.

If we make an automated decision on the basis of any particularly sensitive personal information, we must have either your explicit written consent or it must be justified in the public interest, and we must also put in place appropriate measures to safeguard your rights.

You will not be subject to decisions that will have a significant impact on you based solely on automated decision-making, unless we have a lawful basis for doing so and we have notified you.  

We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you using automated means, however we will notify you in writing if this position changes. 

We may have to share your data with third parties, including third-party service providers and other entities in the group.

We require third parties to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law. 

We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law or where it is necessary to improve or develop public services. Examples of the organisations we may need to share information with are:

• Other Council departments
• Contractors and/or service providers who provide works or services on behalf of the Council
• HM Government departments where required e.g. statutory returns

Which third-parties process my personal information?

”Third parties” includes third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents). The following third-parties process personal information about you for the following purposes:  

• Bang the Table UK Pty Ltd – The Council’s contracted digital consultation platform provider in order to effectively deliver the contract and administer the consultation system.
• Northgate Public Services – The Council’s IT provider Northgate may have to access data held on the Council system on occasions where there is a fault

How secure is my information with third-party service providers?

All our third-party service providers are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions. 

We have put in place measures to protect the security of your information. Details of these measures are available upon request.

Third parties will only process your personal information on our instructions and where they have agreed to treat the information confidentially and to keep it secure.

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality. Details of these measures may be obtained from the Data Protection Officer.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so. 

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available in our retention policy. To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you.  

It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes during your working relationship with us.

Your rights in connection with personal information

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
• Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
• Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.
• Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
• Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact the Data Protection Officer in writing.

For further information on your rights please visit our GDPR web page.

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new privacy notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.

If you have any questions about this privacy notice, please contact the DPO.