Privacy Notice for Housing Applications and Renewals

Why we are collecting your personal data?

Wealden District Council is a data controller for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 and Data Protection Act 2018. We collect, hold and use your personal data in order to assess your housing application or your renewal application and administer this process to completion. We will only collect the personal data from you that we need in order to assess and administer you application.

What is the legal basis for the processing your personal data?

We do this as a task carried out in the public interest in line with the Housing Act 1988. We will not be able to assess and process your housing application or renewal application without the personal data you provide to us.

Who will your personal data be shared with?

We share your personal data internally for our own data matching exercise, using names, addresses and dates of birth. This helps us to ensure the personal data we hold is accurate and up to date and identify customers by a single customer record.

In order to provide these services to you we may need to share your personal data with other agencies (e.g., Adult Social Care, NHS, your GP, CMHT, Care Agencies, Fire Service), registered providers, housing associations and private social housing landlords. We will not share this information unless it will contribute to us being able to meet your support and accommodation needs or unless we feel there is a threat to your own safety or the safety of others. We may also need to contact these third parties to understand and assess your needs more clearly.

We may also use and check your personal data for the investigation and prevention of fraud, anti-social behaviour and criminal activity. This may include sharing your information with police services, credit reference agencies, governmental organisations (e.g., Department for Work and Pensions and HM Revenue and Customs) and other local authorities. We also take part in the National Fraud Initiative’s anti-fraud data matching exercise for these purposes.

Where we need to disclose sensitive information, such as medical details, to a third party, we will only do so once we have obtained your explicit consent or where we are legally required to do so. We may also disclose this information when necessary to prevent risk of harm to an individual.

Your information may be anonymised into statistical or aggregated data in such a way as to ensure that you are not identified or identified from it. This information might be used to conduct research and analysis, including to prepare statistical research and reports.

Providing accurate information

It is important that we hold accurate and up to date information about you in order to assess your needs and deliver appropriate services. If any of your details change please tell us as soon as possible so that we can update your records.

We will not:

• Use your personal data for marketing or sales purposes without your prior explicit consent.
• Store or send your personal data to a country outside the European Economic Area (EEA).
• Make decisions about you based on automated processing of your personal data.

How long will we hold your personal data for?

• All records relating to short term and emergency accommodation for homeless people – six years from the date o f last contact.
• All documents related to successful housing applications – six years from the date of approval of the application.
• All documents related to unsuccessful housing applications – six years from the date of the submission of the application.
• The register of individual housing applications – six years from the date of the application.
• All records relating to changes in existing tenancies – six years from the end of the tenancy.
• All records relating to the allocation system – six years from the end of the tenancy.
• All records relating to the registration for a council property – six years from the end of the tenancy.