South Holland District Council needs to collect and use certain types of information about people in order to operate effectively and efficiently. The processing of personal information is essential to many of our services and functions and this processing will often involve sensitive personal information. We make sure that we process personal information in a fair and lawful way and follow the guidance of the Data Protection Act 1998.
This page contains information regarding:
The law has now extended data processing to include manually held data as well as data held on computer systems. Therefore our data protection policy and procedures apply to the collection and processing of all personal data within the Council, whatever its format. We regard the lawful and correct treatment of personal data as very important to our success and to maintaining confidence between those whom we deal with and ourselves.
The Data Protection Act is in many ways a technical piece of legislation. Our policy and procedures include a number of key terms used in the Act and these are shown below.
Data Subject: A data subject is any individual about whom personal data is held, in any format, by another person or organisation.
Personal Data: Personal data includes any information relating to a living individual who can be identified from the data. This includes not only personal details, details of family and social circumstances, education, employment, business and financial details, but also goods or services received, expressions of opinions or intentions, and images such as those recorded on a photograph or CCTV.
Processing of Personal Data: Processing is defined very widely in the Data Protection Act. It covers all actions and processes involved in the collection, recording, storing, carrying out any set operations or destroying such data.
The Council's Information Management policy confirms our commitment to good data protection practice, to support the eight main principles of the Data Protection Act and provides policy guidance to our staff and elected members.
We have produced a leaflet - Your Right to Know What We Hold About You - that explains your rights, as a user of Council services, to see your personal information and to know how we use it. Some of these rights are:
- to ask us if we hold personal information about you
- to ask us what we use the information for
- to be given a copy, on payment of the set fee, of the information
- to be given details of the purposes for which we use the information and to be told of any other persons or organisations who see this information
- to ask for incorrect data to be corrected
- to ask us not to use personal information about you for direct marketing which is likely to cause damage or distress
- to ask us not to make decisions about you solely based on the automatic processing of the data
One of the rights above gives you a general right of access to your personal data. Access requests must be in writing on our Data Subject Access Request form. There is a fee of £10.00 for each access request. In some cases we may have to withhold data if it refers to other people who have not agreed to disclose their details, or if disclosure could cause damage or distress, or prejudice crime prevention, tax collection or legal proceedings. Even if we cannot provide the data, we will still confirm what type of data we hold and why we hold it.
If you have any questions about data protection, please contact the Data Protection Officer:
Head of Legal and Member Services
South Holland District Council
Council Offices
Priory Road
Spalding
Lincolnshire
PE11 2XE
Tel: 01775 761161
Fax: 01775 711253
Email: info@sholland.gov.uk
If you require further information on data protection, please visit the Information Commissioner's website at www.ico.gov.uk and follow the link for Data Protection.
