Discretionary Housing Payment Privacy Statement

This page was last updated on 19 May 2022

Who we are:

Glasgow City Council is a local authority established under the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994. Its head office is located at City Chambers, George Square, Glasgow G2 1DU, United Kingdom.  Contact details for our Data Protection Officer can be found on our website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy..

Why do we need your personal information and what do we do with it?

You are giving us your personal information to allow us to assess your claim for Discretionary Housing payment and apply it if you are eligible to it.  We also use your information to verify your identity where required, contact you by post, email or telephone and to maintain our records.

Legal basis for using your information:

These services are provided in terms of the council's statutory functions as a local authority, more details of which can be found on our website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.  Processing your personal information is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest by the council. If you do not provide us with the information we have asked for then we will not be able to provide this service to you.

We also need to process more sensitive personal information about you for reasons of substantial public interest as set out in the Data Protection Act 2018. It is necessary for us to process it to carry out key functions as set out in law.

Who do we share your information with?

We are legally obliged to safeguard public funds so details will be checked internally for fraud prevention and verification purposes and may be shared with other public bodies for the same purpose.  We are legally obliged to share certain data with other public bodies such as HMRC and will do so where the law requires this; we will also generally comply with requests for specific information from other regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and proportionate.  We may also share your information with the Department of Work & Pensions, Pension Service, Rent Service Scotland, TransUnion, Mag: Net Solutions, Walker Love, Scott & Co and Glasgow City Assessor and Electoral Registration Officer in relation to your claim for Discretionary Housing Payment.  Information is also analysed internally in order to provide management information, inform service delivery reform and similar purposes.  This is in accordance with the council's Information Use and Privacy Policy, the privacy statement set out in full on our website, and the provisions of our Records Management Plan approved in terms of the Public Records (Scotland) Act 2011.

How long do we keep your information for?

The council maintains a records retention and disposal schedule which sets out how long we hold different types of information for.   This is available on the council's website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/rrds or you can request a hard copy from the contact address below.

Your rights under data protection law

• Access to your information - you have the right to request a copy of the personal information about you that we hold.
• Correcting your information- we want to make sure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date. Therefore, you may ask us to correct any personal information about you that you believe does not meet these standards.
• Deletion of your information-you have the right to ask us to delete personal information about you where:

I.    you think that we no longer need to hold the information for the purposes for which it was originally obtained

II.  you have a genuine objection to our use of your personal information - see Objecting to how we may use your information below

III. our use of your personal information is contrary to law or our other legal obligations..

Objecting to how we may use your information - You have the right at any time to tell us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes. 

Restricting how we may use your information- in some cases, you may ask us to restrict how we use your personal information.  This right might apply, for example, where we are checking the accuracy of personal information that we hold about you or we are assessing the objection you have made to our use of your information.  This right might also apply if we no longer have a basis for using your personal information, but you don't want us to delete the data.  Where this right is realistically applied will mean that we may only use the relevant personal information with your consent, for legal claims or where there are other public interest grounds to do so.

Please contact us as stated above if you wish to exercise any of these rights.

Complaints:

If you do not have access to the internet you can contact us on 0141 287 1055 to request hard copies of any of the above documents.

We aim to directly resolve all complaints about how we handle personal information.  However, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office.  Contact details for our Data Protection Officer and for the ICO can be found on our website under www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.

More information:

For more details on how we process your personal information visit www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.