Council Tax Local Reduction Scheme - 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 and your household to assess and administer any entitlement there may be to Local Council Tax Reduction in an accurate manner.

Situations in which we will use your personal information  

This notice applies to information we hold about you and your household.

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. 

We will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you, the data we hold is kept both in our live and test processing system provided by NEC:

• Your name and date of birth
• National Insurance Number
• Names and dates of birth of everyone who lives in your household
• Address of properties for which you have a Council Tax liability
• Contact details such as addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses
• Amounts and descriptions of any Welfare Benefits you may be in receipt of
• Amounts and descriptions of any Occupational Pensions you may be in receipt of
• Employer and earnings details
• Details of self-employment
• Details of any other money, property or land you may have
• Amounts and description of any disability benefits you may be in receipt of
• Details of any Sub-Tenants, Boarders and Lodgers who may live at your address
• Bank, savings and investment information
• Address and account details in relation to your Council Tax liability/(ies) and any entitlement you may have to Local Council Tax Reduction
• Correspondence and verification of changes in circumstances including e-mails, telephone calls and correspondence received  by the Council in relation to Local Council Tax Reduction

We will use your particularly sensitive personal information in the following ways:

• We will use information about your physical or mental health, or disability status to administer discounts, exemptions, premiums and disregards where applicable in the administration of Local Council Tax Reduction. 

We collect personal information by letter, e-mail, telephone, online, personal visits and through an interface between ourselves and the Department for Works and Pensions hub. Authorised users within the local authority download these files and place them within the relevant work area. The Benefits software processes these files and a proportion of the output is forwarded to Local Authority Benefits Staff for checking and intervention.

Automated Decision Making

We envisage that some decisions will be taken about your claim based solely on automated means using an interface between the Department for Works and Pensions hub and Hartlepool Borough Council. The Benefits software processes these files and the output is forwarded by Hartlepool Borough Council's mailing company (Critiqcom) direct. 

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 one calendar month to request a reconsideration or take a new decision that is not based on automated processing.
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. 

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 the processing is necessary for us to comply with the law namely:

• Local Government Finance Act 1992 and associated Orders
• Local Government Finance Act 2012 and associated Orders  
• Social Security Benefits and Contributions Act 1992, associated Orders and Statutory Instruments.
• Section 13A of the Local Government Finance Act 1992 
• Section 13A of the Local Government Finance Act 2012, associated orders and Statutory Instruments
• Section 13A of the Local Government Finance Act 1992(c.14) ("the 1992 Act"), substituted by section 10 of the Local Government Finance Act 2012(c.17) ("the 2012 Act"), requires each Billing Authority in England to make a scheme specifying the reductions which are to apply to amounts of Council Tax
• Consolidation Amendments 2006  

(b) Where the processing is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law namely administering local council tax support/council tax benefit in accordance with the above legislation.

We may also use your personal information in the following situations, which are likely to be rare:  

(a) Where the processing is necessary to protect someone's life. (VITAL INTERESTS) 

We need all the categories of information in the list above (see what personal information we collect) primarily to enable us to comply with legal obligations and to carry out a public task.

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, we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations we may not be able to assess any entitlement you may have to Local Council Tax Reduction 

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. 

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 not transfer your personal information outside the EU. 

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:

• NEC - The Council's ICT provider NEC may have access to systems on occasions where there is a fault 
• Department for Work and Pensions to accurately determine any entitlement to Local Council Tax Reduction
• Automated decision making based on information provided by the Department for Work and Pensions

Why might you share my personal information with third parties?

This authority/organisation is required by law to protect the public funds it administers. It may share information provided to it with other bodies responsible for; auditing, or administering public funds, or where undertaking a public function, in order to prevent and detect fraud. The Cabinet Office is responsible for carrying out data matching exercises. See further information on our fair processing notice.

We will share your personal information with third parties where required by law or where it is necessary to administer your Local Council Tax Reduction. Examples of the organisations we may need to share information with are:

• Critiqom Ltd (printing and mailing company) - the Council shares your details for the purposes of issuing Local Council Tax Reduction Decision Notices.
• Department for Work and Pensions - the Council may share your details for the purpose of accurate and timely assessment of Local Council Tax Reduction

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.