How the Council uses your information

The Council is committed to abiding by the Data Protection Act, as well as peoples’ rights to confidentiality and respect for privacy.

We treat your private information with respect.  It is kept secure and only those staff who are entitled to see it, have access to it.

We will do our best to keep information about you accurate and up to date.

When we no longer have a need to keep information about you, we will dispose of it in a secure manner.

In particular, we will use information about you on the following basis:-

1) For all law enforcement, regulation and licensing, criminal prosecutions and court proceedings, we will use all information held by us in order to undertake those functions efficiently and effectively.

2) For all uses of information relating to situations where you owe money to the Council, or where we are paying you money, or you are claiming grants, housing or council tax benefits, your personal information (other than just your name, address, dates of occupancy etc) will be kept secure and used only for that range of purposes (and for those stated at 1. above).

By doing that we are able to:-

• Provide you with a better level of service, ensuring that our information about you is accurate and up to date.
• Ensure that public (taxpayers’) money is spent wisely and efficiently.
• Avoid people being paid money to which they are not entitled.
• Avoid having to ask people to pay money back when it has been paid to them incorrectly.
• Reduce fraud and crime generally.

3) For other functions of the Council (see below) we will seek to ensure that your name, address, date of occupancy etc., is used intelligently, in order that we treat you as our customer and minimise inefficiency.

It is important to us that we properly coordinate what we do for you.  As a result, when you tell us that you are moving address or changing your name, we will try and make it as easy as we can for you.  We will try and keep all of our records up to date with your name and address details.

Services

• Environmental Health
• Enforcement
• Neighbourhood Action
• Cleansing
• Waste Services
• Grounds Maintenance
• Highways
• Leisure
• Planning
• Social Care
• Education

4) We will not pass any of your information to any other organisation unless either you ask us to do it, or such as is in accordance with the law.

If you would like to know more, including about how we look after your information, please contact:

Data Protection Officer,
Room 51, County Hall,
Wakefield, WF1 2QW

Telephone:  01924 305473

email: DataProtection@wakefield.gov.uk