Privacy notice – housing assistance

North Somerset Council is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office for the purposes of processing personal data

The information you provide will be held and used in accordance with the requirements of UK and European data protection law. The information will form part of your private sector housing account, and will be held for the condition period of assistance received plus one year after the certified date. In the case of disabled facilities grants where a grant was awarded, information will be held for ten years after the award.

Unless otherwise agreed with you, we will only collect the minimum personal data required to deliver the service, which includes details of household, names, address, National Insurance numbers, financial information.

The information will be used for the administration of the housing renewals assistance policy; our statutory duty under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 and the Housing Act 2004, in accordance with GDPR Article 6(1)(c).

We will not use your personal information in a way that may cause you unwarranted nuisance. Failure to provide the information could result in us being unable to assist and progress your application for assistance.

The information provided may/will be shared with West of England Care and Repair and Wessex Resolutions CIC, who have demonstrated that they have a lawful and legitimate interest in the information, for the purposes of being unable to assist and progress your application for assistance.  Your data is never shared or processed outside of the UK.

We may lawfully disclose information to public sector agencies to prevent or detect fraud or other crime, or to support the national fraud initiatives and protect public funds under the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. Under the conditions of the Digital Economy Act 2017, we may also share personal data provided to us with other public authorities as defined in the Act, for the purposes of fraud or crime detection or prevention, to recover monies owed to us, to improve public service delivery, or for statistical research. We do not share the information with other organisations for commercial purposes.

The housing assistance service relies on an automated decision making process, called Ferret, to assist in the means-testing of your grant. We consider this to be lawful in accordance with Article 22(2)(b) of GDPR, as defined by Part 2 of the Housing Renewals Grant Regulations 1996, as amended by Housing Renewal Grant (amendment) (England) Regulations 2009.

You have the right to see the personal data we process about you, as well as the right of rectification and restriction (to destruction of records only).  

If you have any questions or concerns about the way we process your personal data, contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@n-somerset.gov.uk