Data protection

Cheltenham Borough Council is committed to compliance with data protection legislation. Keeping your personal information accurate and secure is a vital part of providing efficient services to you. You can find out more about how we do this in our data protection policy and data quality policy.

The council will only use the information it holds about you for the purpose you provided it and as the law allows. It will also only collect the minimum information necessary to provide services to you.

When you provide information you will be told what it will be used for and whom it will be shared with. However, you need to be aware that the council is required to share your information on occasion with other agencies to help reduce crime or investigate fraud. An example of this is in reducing housing benefit fraud and involves the council sharing council tax, housing benefit, electoral registration and other licensing and registration data to ensure that claimants are not claiming illegally.

We also work closely with other councils and community organisations and often need to share information with them in order to deliver your services. However, we will not supply these organisations with your information unless we are satisfied that equal measures are in place to protect the information from unauthorised access. The council will also not supply your information to any organisation for marketing purposes without your prior consent.

Where required we will conduct data protection impact assessments prior to processing personal data.

Sharing information with other partner agencies

The council has a responsibility to promote social wellbeing and to work with other councils and partner agencies such as the police, voluntary services, health service and housing providers in order to preserve life, reduce accidents, reduce crime and disorder and improve health. To promote this social wellbeing the council may need to share your personal information with others and these partner agencies where the law allows.

Sometimes we may use anonymisation and pseudonymisation to ensure that we share information in a safe and lawful way.

Why does the council collect and retain personal data?

In order to provide you with efficient and effective services Cheltenham Borough Council needs to collect personal data. We may also need to share your personal data with other service providers who are contracted to carry out services on our behalf. These providers are obliged to keep your personal details secure and use them only to fulfil your service request.

The council will process the information you provide in a way that complies with the data protection principles.

Cheltenham Borough Council will use information about you to provide services and specifically for the following:

• all law enforcement, regulation and licensing, criminal prosecutions and court proceedings which the council is obliged to undertake

• all financial transactions to and from the council including payments, grants and benefits. Where monies are due or outstanding, the council reserves the right to use all the available information at its disposal to protect public funds

Your information will only be held as long as necessary and will be disposed of in a secure manner when no longer needed. Further information around retention and destruction is available in our data retention policy.

For full details on which services collect data and how they use it, please view our privacy notices page.