Additional funding has been made available to county councils and unitary authorities in England to support those most in need to help with global inflationary challenges and the significantly rising cost of living. This funding covers the period from Saturday 1 April 2023 to Sunday 31 March 2024 inclusive.
More information about these changes can be found on the GOV.UK website.
If you apply, we may need to process personal data to assess whether you are eligible to receive financial support, and if so, to provide a payment to you. This privacy notice sets out what personal data we will use, how we will use it, and why we need to, when an applicant applies for this support.
Data controller
We are the data controller for the purposes of assessing eligibility, administering and making payments under the Government’s Household Support Fund.
Categories of personal data we collect and process
We collect and process the following data that you provide to us when completing your application for a grant payment. Note that depending on the answers to the questions you provide during the application process you may only be asked to provide some of the following information:
- name
- address
- contact telephone number
- email address
- National Insurance number
- Council Tax account number
- name of person liable for Council Tax
- Housing Benefit and Council Tax support reference number
- details of any other benefits you receive
- whether you are a care leaver
- if you have children in receipt of free school meals
- what government help you have had in the past
- description of how you are struggling to afford energy and water bills, food and other related essentials
- your monthly income
- your monthly outgoings
- description of your household
What we use your personal data for
We will carry out checks with our own records, and potentially with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to validate your application. We are also required to make two Statements of Grant Usage and management information (MI) returns using information arising from your application to the Department of Work and Pensions.
We will use the information you provide as part of your application to carry out anti-fraud checks.
With the exception of our data processors as described below, we will only share this data with other organisations or individuals outside of North Somerset Council for the purposes of validating the eligibility of your application and conducting anti-fraud checks as described previously.
Our lawful basis for processing the personal data
We must have a legal basis to process your personal data. Our lawful basis in the processing that we’ll undertake in assessing your eligibility for, and in making any payment to you, is based on an obligation placed upon us by the Department for Work and Pensions.
Where we use personal information to confirm that a person is eligible for a payment under the scheme, the section of the law that applies is:
- GDPR Article 6(1)(e) – processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller
In this case the authority to process applications is vested in North Somerset Council by the Household Support Fund announced by the Government on 20 February 2023.
Data processors and other recipients of your data
These are the recipients with which your personal data is shared.
Our strategic technical partner, Agilisys, acts as a data processor for us as they manage the IT systems within which your personal data is stored.
Liberata UK also acts as a data processor for us as they process the financial transactions required to make all payments from the fund.
In addition to the Government departments and our data processors named above, we will not share your information with anyone else.
International data transfers and storage
The information you provide will be held securely on computer equipment located in the UK. No information will be processed outside of the UK.
Personal data disposal and retention
We will only keep the personal data that supports your application for as long as it is needed for the purposes of addressing the cost-of-living crisis, and for audit and payment purposes.
Details of all financial transactions on our accounts are held in line with legislative requirements for the current financial year plus six further financial years.
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Your rights as a data subject
By law, you have a number of rights as a data subject and this does not take away or reduce these rights. Your rights under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679) and the UK Data Protection Act 2018 applies.
All information is processed in accordance with the North Somerset Council data protection policy.
These rights are:
- your right to get copies of your information – you have the right to ask for a copy of any information about you that is used.
- your right to get your information corrected – you have the right to ask for any information held about you that you think is inaccurate, to be corrected
- your right to limit how your information is used – you have the right to ask for any of the information held about you to be restricted, for example, if you think inaccurate information is being used.
- your right to object to your information being used – you can ask for any information held about you to not be used. However, this is not an absolute right, and we may need to continue using your information, and we will tell you if this is the case.
- your right to get information deleted – this is not an absolute right, and we may need to continue to use your information, and we will tell you if this is the case.
If you are unhappy or wish to complain about how your personal data is used as part of this programme, you should contact the council’s information governance manager at dpo@n-somerset.gov.uk in the first instance.
If you are still not satisfied, you can complain to the Information Commissioners Office.
Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
Security
We use appropriate technical, organisational and administrative security measures to protect any information we hold in our records from loss, misuse, and unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration and destruction. We have written procedures and policies which are regularly audited, and the audits are reviewed at senior level.
Data Protection Officer
As a public body we are obliged to appoint a Data Protection Officer whose responsibility includes to act as a point of contact for data subjects, i.e. those people for whom we process personal data.
Our data protection officer is:
Nicholas Brain - Head of Legal and Democratic Services, Town Hall, Walliscote Grove Road, Weston-super-Mare, BS23 1UJ
You can email the Data Protection Officer at dpo@n-somerset.gov.uk
Automated decision making or profiling
No decision will be made about you solely on the basis of automated decision making (where a decision is taken about you using an electronic system without human involvement) which has a significant impact on you.
Changes to our policy
We keep our privacy notice under regular review, and we will make new versions available on our privacy notice page on our website. This privacy notice was last updated on Thursday 20 April 2023.