Elected members privacy notice - Privacy notices

Herefordshire Council is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information. This privacy notice describes how we collect and use personal information about you during and after your working relationship with us, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is also intended to provide you with other information which is required under the GDPR. It applies to all councillors.

We will collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:

• Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, and personal email addresses
• Date of birth
• Gender
• Next of kin and emergency contact information
• National Insurance number
• Bank account details, payroll records and tax status information
• Details of basic allowance and special responsibility allowances paid
• Date of election
• DBS information
• Details of any code of conduct complaints made against councillors
• Information about your use of our information and communications systems

We may also collect, store and use the following special categories of more sensitive personal information:

• Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation
• Information about medical conditions to assess whether any reasonable adjustments are required

We collect personal information about councillors through the induction process following election.

We will collect additional personal information in the course of any councillor-related activity throughout the period of you being elected.

Herefordshire Council is the data controller. This means that we are responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information about you. We are required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.

It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy notice we may provide on specific occasions when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information.

The situations in which we will process your personal information are listed below.

• Paying you the basic allowance and any special responsibility allowance and,
• Deducting tax and National Insurance contributions, if required
• Liaising with HMRC
• Gathering evidence for possible code of conduct complaints
• Making arrangements for you no longer serving as a councillor
• Education, training and development requirements
• Dealing with legal disputes involving you, or employees, workers and contractors, including accidents at work
• Complying with health and safety obligations
• Equal opportunities monitoring

Some of the above grounds for processing will overlap and there may be several grounds which justify our use of your personal information.

How we use particularly sensitive personal information

Special categories of particularly sensitive personal information require higher levels of protection. We need to have further justification for collecting, storing and using this type of personal information. We may process special categories of personal information in the following circumstances:

• In limited circumstances, with your explicit written consent
• Where we need to carry out our legal obligations or exercise rights in connection with employment

Our obligations as an employer

We will use your particularly sensitive personal information in the following ways:

• We will use information about your physical or mental health, or disability status, to ensure your health and safety in the workplace and to assess any reasonable adjustments which may be necessary
• We will use information about your race or national or ethnic origin, religious, philosophical or moral beliefs or sexual orientation, to ensure meaningful equal opportunity monitoring and reporting.

We will only use your personal information when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:

• Where we need to comply with a legal obligation
• Where there is a legitimate purpose in us doing so
• Where you have provided consent

We may also use your personal information in the following situations, which are likely to be rare:

• Where we need to protect your interests (or someone else's interests)
• Where it is needed in the public interest

In circumstances where you may have provided your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact the data protection officer (DPO).

We may have to share your personal information with third parties, including third-party service providers. All of which are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with our policies. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

On occasions, your information may be accessed by contracted IT support organisations in the delivery of IT support for both the IT infrastructure and associated systems, for the processes detailed in this privacy notice. Access by IT support will only be for such reasons as fixing any technical issues with software, and any viewing of data will be incidental to this.

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available in our retention policy which is available from the DPO or the access to information section.

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a data subject access request). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it
• Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected
• Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below)
• Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes
• Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it
• Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

Changes to this privacy notice

We reserve the right to update this privacy notice at any time.

We have appointed a data protection officer (DPO) to oversee compliance with this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the DPO at Herefordshire Council, Plough Lane, Hereford HR4 0LE, email: informationgovernance@herefordshire.gov.uk

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.

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