Southend-on-Sea City Council

Your privacy and how we use your information

We are committed to protecting your privacy when you use our services. It is important to us that you can trust us to keep your information safe and to use it in ways that you will think are reasonable and ethical.
Southend-on-Sea City Council are the data controller for the information we have about you, this means we control how your personal information is processed and for what purposes.
This Privacy Notice explains how we use information about you and how we protect your privacy. For information on our Admissions Privacy Policy, please click here.

We have a Data Protection Officer who makes sure we respect your rights and follow the law.
If you have any concerns or questions about how we look after your personal information, please contact the Data Protection Officer at Dataprotection@southend.gov.uk or by calling 01702 215000.

What ‘personal information’ means

Personal information can be any information which relates to a living individual who can be identified from it. This can include information that when put together with other information can then identify a person.
The information we collect about you may vary based on what service we are providing to you.
Typically we need details like

You and your child’s name, Date of Birth and address so we know who you are and what services you need from us.
Your contact details such as telephone numbers or email addresses so that we can keep in touch with you about our services.
Information about your child’s school, and education.

Why we need your personal information

We may need to use some information about you to:

deliver services and support to you;
manage the services we provide to you;
train and manage the employment of our workers who deliver those services;
help investigate any worries or complaints you have about your services;
keep track of spending on services;
check the quality of services; and
help with research and the planning of new services.

How the law allows us to use your personal information

There are a number of legal reasons why we need to collect and use your personal information. Generally we collect and use personal information where:

you have entered into a contract with us.
it is necessary to perform our statutory duties.
it is necessary to protect someone in an emergency.
it is required by law.
it is necessary for employment purposes.
it is necessary to deliver health or social care services.
you have made your information publicly available.
it is necessary for legal cases.
you, or your legal representative, have given consent.
it is to the benefit of society as a whole.
it is necessary to protect public health.
it is necessary for archiving, research, or statistical purposes.
If we have based our use of your information on your consent, you have the right to withdraw it at any time. If you want to remove your consent, please contact Dataprotection@southend.gov.uk and tell us which service you’re using so we can deal with your request.

How much information we collect about you

We will only collect and use personal information if we need it to deliver a service or meet a requirement.
We only collect information about you that we need in order for you to receive a service from us. We respect your privacy and will keep what we collect to a minimum.
If you call our Customer Service Centre, we may record your phone call for security and training purposes and to make sure we record the details of your contact.
If we use your personal information for research and analysis, we will usually keep your details anonymous or disguise your details (unless you’ve agreed that your personal information can be used for that research).
When visiting our websites, you may also be providing us with certain information through our use of website ‘cookies’. You can find out more about this in the cookie information on our websites.
We don’t sell your personal information to anyone else.

We appreciate you have provided your information to us and may not want us to share it with others. However sometimes it is necessary for us to do so. We only share your information where we are permitted or required to by law, or where you have requested us to do so. We may share your information with, for example:

Any of your family, associates, or someone who represents you, where you have asked us to do so
Our employees to provide you with services or support
Internal departments and other organisations for statistical and analytical purposes
Our contractors to help us provide you with our services
Credit reference and fraud prevention agencies in order to help prevent and detect fraud or as part of our debt collection service
External agencies like the police, fire service or other Councils
Any person or organisation where we are required to because of a court order, legal duty or statutory obligation We are careful to keep to a minimum such sharing; whenever we share your information we do everything we can to make sure it is protected.

If our information about you is incorrect

You can ask to change information you think is inaccurate, you should let us know if you disagree with something we have on record about you.
We may not always be able to change or remove that information but we’ll correct factual inaccuracies and may include your comments in the record to show that you disagree with it.

Please let us know if your mobile phone, email address or other contact information changes so that we can keep this information up to date.

If you want to know what information we have recorded about you we will handle routine enquires as part of our usual customer service. If you want to see more of the information that we have about you, you can make a data subject access request. For more information and access to the forms - Click here

Your individual rights

You have the following rights over the use of your personal information:

The right to be informed – being told about the type of information we collect and how we use and look after it
The right of access – being given a copy of the personal information we hold about you
The right to rectification – having inaccurate personal information corrected
The right to erase (the right to be forgotten) – having personal information deleted from records or records deleted entirely
The right to restrict processing – requiring us to store but not use personal information concerning you
The right to data portability – being provided with an electronic copy of certain records to use for a different purpose
The right to object – to put a case forward for stopping processing your personal information, including for marketing
Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling – to have a human reconsider automated decisions and profiling

There are rules concerning when the different rights can be used, you can find out more on our Individual Rights of Data Subjects – Policy and Procedure web page.

How long we keep your personal information

There’s often a legal or operational reason for keeping your personal information for a set period of time, you can find more detailed information on this in our retention schedules.

Keeping your information secure

We make every effort to keep your information safe:

We take appropriate care to secure the information we hold about you
We have robust technical security such as passwords and information encryption
We have policies and procedures to make sure your information is only available to our employees who need to see it to do their job, and we train these employees appropriately.
We establish robust procedures and contracts to extend these protections to any other person or organisation we made need to give your information to.

Who you can contact about data protection and your rights

If you have a question about anything covered in this privacy notice you can email the Data Protection officer at dataprotection@southend.gov.uk
For independent advice about data protection, privacy and data sharing issues, or to lodge a complaint about how we have handled your information, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO):
You can either visit ico.org.uk or email casework@ico.org.uk

Alternatively you can write or telephone:
Information Commissioner's Office,
Wycliffe House,
Water Lane,
Wilmslow,
Cheshire,
SK9 5AF

Tel: 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745 if you prefer to use a national rate number.

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