Privacy Policy

Blackburn with Darwen Council is committed to ensuring that we are transparent about the ways in which we use your personal information and that we have the right controls in place to ensure it is used responsibly and is kept safe from inappropriate access, theft or misuse.

We provide a broad range of services as well undertaking regulatory and administrative activities. These include the provision of education, child protection and care services (supporting early years, vulnerable adults and the elderly), the collection of taxes, administration of local welfare benefits and grants as well as our regulatory, enforcement and licensing activities.

This notice explains how we use your personal information and tells you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

What is personal information?

Personal information can be anything that identifies and relates to a living person. This can include information that when linked with other information, allows a person to be uniquely identified. For example, this could be your name and contact details.

The law treats some types of personal information as ‘special’ because the information requires more protection due to its sensitivity. This information consists of:

• Racial or ethnic origin
• Sexuality and sexual life
• Religious or philosophical beliefs
• Trade union membership
• Political opinions
• Genetic and bio-metric data
• Physical or mental health
• Criminal convictions and offences

Purposes

Your personal information may be collected and used for one or more of the Council’s services, regulatory functions and/or administrative activities depending on your relationship with the Council and nature of your contact with us.

Generally, we may need to use some information about you:

• in delivering services and ensuring other statutory or voluntary agencies with whom the council is working, are able to deliver ‘joined up’ services to you
• in planning future services;
• collecting taxes, administering grants and welfare benefits
• for managing and checking the quality of our services;
• keeping track of spending on services;
• if you apply for a job or become employed by us;
• for ensuring the health and safety of our staff
• to help investigate any concerns or complaints you have about our services and for answering enquiries under access legislation;
• in carrying out our regulatory activities, such as enforcement, planning, safeguarding, licencing etc.;
• to improve the general experience of our customers and of visitors to our websites
• for managing any one line transactions you may elect to make and/or marketing choices or preferences you may have expressed
• in the event of civil disasters and/or emergencies
• for archiving, research, or statistical purposes (including research and evaluation undertaken by the Council or in combination with neighbouring authorities to inform future service planning where the use of fully anonymised information would frustrate the purpose of the research)

Personal information

Generally we collect personal information where:

• you, or your legal representative, have given consent
• you have entered into a contract with us
• it is required by law (such as where this is mandated by statute or under a court order)
• it is necessary to perform statutory functions (including law enforcement functions)
• it is necessary for employment related purposes
• it is necessary to deliver health or social care services
• it is necessary to protect you or others from harm (e.g.in an emergency or civil disaster)
• it is necessary to protect public health
• it is necessary for exercising or defending legal rights
• you have made your information publicly available
• it is necessary for archiving, research, or statistical purposes
• it is necessary in the substantial public interest for wider societal benefits and is authorised by law
• it is necessary for fraud prevention and the protection of public funds
• when it is in our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) provided your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests

Your personal information may also be shared with other organisations, such as those who assist us in providing services and those who perform technical operations such as data storage and hosting on our behalf.

These practical arrangements and the laws governing the sharing and disclosure of personal information often differ from one service to another.

For this reason, each of our key service areas provide additional information about how we collect and use your information. These service specific privacy notices explain:

• why we need your information
• who else we obtain or receive it from
• the legal basis for collection and the choices you have
• who we share it with and why
• whether decisions which legally affect you are made solely using machine based technologies
• how long we keep your information
• how to exercise your rights

Service specific privacy notices

Leisure Services

Wellbeing Service

Data transfers beyond EEA

We will only send your data outside the European Economic Area (‘EEA’):

• with your consent, or
• to comply with a lawful and legitimate request, or
• if we use service providers or contractors in non EEA countries.

If we do transfer your information beyond the EEA, we will make sure that it is protected in the same way as if it was being used in the EEA. We will use one of these safeguards:

• Transfer it to a non EEA country with privacy laws that give the same protection as the EEA. Learn more on the European Commission Justice website.
• Put in place a contract with the recipient that means they must protect it to the same standards as the EEA. More information is available on the European Commission Justice website.
• Transfer it to organisations that are part of the Privacy Shield. This is a framework that sets privacy standards for data sent between the US and EU countries. It makes sure those standards are similar to what is used within the EEA. You can find out more about the Privacy Shield on the European Commission Justice website.

If we propose to make a transfer in response to a lawful and legitimate request we will normally tell you in advance unless there are compelling reasons, such as law enforcement or, reasons of safety which justify not doing so.

Automated decisions

If we make a decision which legally affects you by using a computerised system or programme that does not involve a human being, our service specific privacy notices will explain this. Our Data Protection webpage outlines the procedure to ask us for an automated decision to be reviewed by an appropriate officer.

Data retention/criteria

We will only keep your personal information for as long as the law specifies or where the law does not specify this, for the length of time determined by our business requirements.