Privacy notice - Healthy Start scheme

North Somerset Council is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office for the purposes of processing personal data.  For full details of how we use personal data, please see the Privacy section on the our website.

Healthy Start is a national scheme run by the NHS that helps people with incomes below a given level who are pregnant or who have children under four years old. It contributes towards the cost of buying healthy food, milk, and formula milk. 

The scheme also provides access to free vitamins. If you live in North Somerset, you can request these directly from us and we will arrange for them to be sent to you. Please see the vitamin section of the Better Health website for current information about accessing vitamins locally.

Further information on the scheme is available on the NHS website.

The NHS administers the Healthy Start Scheme and will issue you a chip and PIN card for the purpose of purchasing eligible items from approved suppliers. 

Our involvement occurs when you wish to obtain the free vitamins that are available as part of the scheme. We will capture some personal information from you when you tell us that you need the vitamins.

We must collect some personal information from you so that:

• we can establish that you are part of the scheme and are entitled to receive free vitamins
• we know how to deliver the vitamins to you
• we can identify geographical areas in which we need to enhance the promotion of the Healthy Start service

Within the UK General Data Protection Regulation, we are permitted to process the personal information we gather from you. We feel that the processing is necessary for the performance of a task that we carry out in the exercise of official authority vested in us as a local council. 

The entitlement to free vitamins was introduced in regulation 7 of the Healthy Start Scheme and Welfare Food (Amendment No. 2) Regulations 2006. We distribute the vitamins on behalf of the local Integrated Care Board.

In order to provide you with free vitamins under the scheme we process the following personal information:

• your name
• postal address
• an image of your Healthy Start membership card showing your name and expiry date

The personal information we process is used only by us to validate your participation in the Healthy Start scheme and to send you the vitamins if you require them to be delivered. 

We will otherwise only share your personal information with other agencies if we are required to do so by law. For example, where we are obliged to share information for the purposes of preventing and detecting fraud.

None of the information covered by this privacy notice will be processed outside of the UK or EU.

Your personal details will be retained only for the time required to send you the vitamins you have requested. At this point your information will be irrevocably deleted from our systems.

We do not make any automated decisions using the personal information covered in this privacy notice. 

All decisions arising from the information you provide will be subject to human involvement.

The UK General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act give you rights over your personal information that we process. The extent of the rights granted to you is determined by the reasons that the processing is deemed to be allowed. 

We have explained these reasons in the section Are we allowed to process your personal information? The rights that are granted to you relating to the information covered by this privacy notice are:

• you have the right to receive ‘concise and transparent information’ about how we handle your personal data. We achieve this through the use of this privacy notice as well as other privacy information published on the North Somerset Council website
• you have the right of access to the personal information we hold about you, the reasons it is being processed, whether it is shared with other organisations, how long we hold it for, and whether there has been a security breach involving your personal data
  • To exercise this right you can make a subject access request and the process for doing this can be found on our dedicated webpage. You do not have to make a subject access request in writing or via the website; you can make such a request verbally if you wish
• you have the right to request that we correct any data we hold about you that is inaccurate
• you have the right to request us to restrict the extent of our data processing. For example if you believe that the information we hold about you is incorrect. You might also not want us to delete information as it approaches the end of its retention period. In these circumstances we are allowed to continue to store the information, but not use it for any other purpose
• you have the right to object to us processing your personal information in the manner described within this privacy notice. You can do this in writing or by speaking to us. You can exercise your right by contacting any of our officers (an officer is a member of staff) however we would encourage you to contact our Data Protection Officer in the first instance using the contact details provided in the next section.
• you have a right to make a complaint if you are unhappy about the way we process your personal information. The procedure for making a complaint is described in the following section.

If you wish to make a complaint about how we handle your personal data, we ask that you give our Data Protection Officer the opportunity to respond in the first instance, but you are not obliged to do this.  You can make your complaint directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted at dpo@n-somerset.gov.uk 

The Information Commissioner is the designated regulator in the UK for all complaints relating the processing of personal information. If you are unhappy with the way we have managed your information you can seek more advice and raise a complaint via the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website.

Finally, you can also contact the ICO in writing at the provided address.