Your privacy

We use a range of organisations to either store personal information or help deliver our services to you. Where we have these arrangements there is always an agreement in place to make sure that the organisation complies with data protection law.

We’ll often complete a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) before we share personal information to make sure we protect your privacy and comply with the law. Sometimes we have a legal duty to provide personal information to other organisations. This is often because we need to give that data to courts, including:

• if we take a child into care
• if the court orders that we provide the information, and
• if someone is taken into care under mental health law

We may also share your personal information when we feel there’s a good reason that’s more important than protecting your privacy. This doesn’t happen often, but we may share your information:

• if there are serious risks to the public, our staff or to other professionals
• to protect a child, or
• to protect adults who are thought to be at risk, for example if they are frail, confused or cannot understand what is happening to them

Working with fraud prevention agencies

The personal information we have collected from you will be shared with fraud prevention agencies who will use it to prevent fraud, money-laundering and to verify your identity. They will also share your information with a range of information providers to obtain documentation or information that will allow us to verify the information you have provided us is accurate. If fraud is detected, you could be refused certain services, finance, or employment.

Further details of how your information will be used by us and these fraud prevention agencies, and your data protection rights can be found on the National Anti Fraud Network (NAFN) and the National Fraud Initiative (NFI) Fraudhub privacy notices.

For all of these reasons the risk must be serious before we can override your right to privacy.

We also participate in the Cabinet Office’s National Fraud Initiative, a data matching exercise to assist in the prevention and detection of fraud. We are required to provide particular sets of data to the Minister for the Cabinet Office for matching for each exercise.

The use of data by the Cabinet Office in a data matching exercise is carried out with statutory authority under Part 6 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. It does not require the consent of the individuals concerned under the Data Protection Act 2018.

Data matching by the Cabinet Office is subject to a Code of Practice.

Read the National Fraud Initiative privacy notice for more information about the Cabinet Office’s legal powers and the reasons why it matches particular information.

We may also upload your data to the Pan Essex Data Hub as part of a data sharing agreement with other Essex authorities. The Pan Essex Hub is hosted in the UK and managed by our data processor Vigilant Apps. This exercise allows us to identify potential fraud by comparing our datasets with other local authorities. If a query is identified, we may share or receive your personal data with or from the relevant parties accordingly.

Keeping you safe

If we’re worried about your physical safety or feel we need to take action to protect you from being harmed in other ways, we’ll discuss this with you and, if possible, get your permission to tell others about your situation before doing so.

We may still share your information if we believe the risk to others is serious enough to do so.

There may also be rare occasions when the risk to others is so great that we need to share information straight away.

If this is the case, we’ll make sure that we record what information we share and our reasons for doing so. We’ll let you know what we’ve done and why if we think it is safe to do so.