Privacy notice for Council Tax

What do we use the information for?

Council Tax collects, processes and holds your personal and financial information in order to provide our services effectively, to bill, collect and recover Council Tax.

We also use information to improve our services so that they are more appropriate to people’s requirements. We recognise that your personal information is important to you, and we take our responsibilities for ensuring that we collect and manage it proportionately, correctly and safely very seriously.

On 3 February 2022 the government announced an energy rebate to help with the rising energy costs. This includes a £150 council tax energy rebate payment for households that are liable for Council Tax in Bands A-D in England payable after April 2022.

We use personal information to award payments to:

confirm residency at property (sole/main residence)
verify bank account for payments to be made.

What information do we hold and use?

We collect and process the following information:

Personal information (including full name, full residential address, date of birth)
Location data (including postcode and telephone number)
Contact/ appointee details (including full name, full residential address)
Occupancy status (such as how many adults reside in the property)
Bank details for invoicing/ payments
Information relating to household income (including state benefits)
Information relating to household expenditure (including rent charges).

On what grounds do we use the information?

Council tax collect and lawfully process your personal information under the following:

Local Government Finance Act 1992
Debt Respite Scheme (Breathing Space Moratorium and Mental Health Crisis Moratorium) (England and Wales) Regulations 2020.

We process personal data for the following reasons:

GDPR Article 6(1)(a) - the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes
GDPR Article 6(1)(c) - processing is necessary for compliance with legal obligation to which the East Riding of Yorkshire Council is subject
GDPR Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest in the exercise of official authority vested in the East Riding of Yorkshire Council.

How do we collect this information?

We may collect information in the following ways:

Paper, electronic or online forms
Email
Letter
Telephone
Face-to-face, with one of our employees or one of our partners
Via the national ‘Tell Us Once’ scheme.

Who do we share your information with?

We may disclose your information to others, but only where this is necessary either to comply with our legal obligations or as permitted by Data Protection legislation. We may share it with other public service bodies including the Cabinet Office (Fraud and Error, Debt and Grants Team), the Department for Work and Pensions, Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs, the Valuation Office Agency, Her Majesty’s Court Tribunal Service, the Office for National Statistics, debt advice providers and external organisations such as enforcement agencies (Jacobs Enforcement, Newlyn PLC, Rundle and Co Ltd, Dukes Bailiffs Ltd, Marston (Holdings Ltd)) and insolvency practitioner companies (Wilkin Chapman, Horsfields and DWF Legal).

We may also disclose your information to an external provider, namely ‘Policy in Practice’ (PIP), in order for us to use a low income family tracker (LIFT) dashboard. Your information is shared with this provider, who subsequently upload the data to the dashboard allowing the housing benefit and council tax support teams to focus their attention into helping families in need of financial assistance.

Policy in Practice (external website)

To enable the Council Tax team to carry out their functions, they use a housing system called ActiveH which is supplied by MIS-Active Management Systems Limited.

MIS-Active Management Systems Limited (external website)

The reasons why we may share your data with other public bodies are as follows:

To protect public funds
To ensure information held by the service is accurate
To gain data intelligence on employment information for the purposes of collecting unpaid council tax
To monitor and improve our performance and delivery of services
For the prevention and or detection of crime
Where necessary to protect individuals from the risk of harm or injury
Where otherwise permitted under the General Data Protection legislation.

We will only disclose your sensitive or confidential information if we are legally required to do so, or where we have good reason to believe that failing to share the information would put you or someone else at risk of harm.

We will not pass your personal information to external organisations for marketing or sales purposes or for any commercial use without your prior expressed consent.

How long do we store it and is it secure?

Council tax has retention schedules in place to ensure that information is only held for as long as it is needed. We will not keep your information for longer than is required to by law. Your information will be disposed of in a controlled and secure manner in accordance with the council’s Records Management and Data Quality Policy. The council’s IT security and confidentiality policies ensure that your information is protected and accessed only by staff directly involved in your case.

For information on how long your information will be held visit the retention page.

What rights do you have?

The rights that you have depend upon the grounds on which we collected your information. All of the rights you could have are outlined on the data protection rights page.

In most cases, people who have been involved with council tax will be covered by the following rights:

The right to access - you are entitled to see the information we hold about you
The right to rectification - we will amend information accordingly, if any information that the service holds about you is incorrect
The right to restrict processing - you may wish to limit how we use your data
The right to object - in addition to the right to limit the use of your data, you also have a right to object to the use of your data for certain actions
The right to erasure/right to be forgotten - in certain circumstances, you may be able to ask for some of the information we hold to be deleted. The service has determined that all requests to permanently delete a service user record will be dealt with on an individual basis.

To exercise any of your above rights, please visit the data protection rights page for more information.

Where can I find out more?

If you would like to know more about how the Council uses information, your rights or have a concern about the way we are collecting or using your personal data, we request that you raise your concern with us in the first instance; contact details are available on the general privacy information page. Alternatively, you can contact the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The ICO is the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest and they handle public concerns regarding organisations information rights practices.

Alternatively, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (external website)

When was this privacy notice last updated?

We will continually review and update this privacy notice to reflect any changes in our services, feedback from customers, and to comply with any changes in the law. This privacy notice was last updated on 16 November 2023.

eastriding.gov.uk

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