Privacy Policy

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PRIVACY NOTICE and CONSENT STATEMENT

In the course of Home-Start Colchester scheme’s work we provide Mentoring family support and friendship to your family and monitoring and evaluating your needs, we collect and hold certain personal information about you. We will only do so with your explicit consent and in accordance with all applicable data protection legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation.

Information collected

The personal information collected by us will be limited to that which is essential to allow us to provide the support you require and deserve. This will include:

  • Names, genders, addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.
  • Employment, immigration statuses, disabilities (such as physical or learning disabilities) and racial/ethnic origins.
  • Data concerning health (such as substance abuse, domestic abuse, mental health, depression and pregnancy).
  • Details of any ancillary support services/agencies being used by the family (such as family GP, health advisors, social workers, mother & baby clinics, children’s centres, CAMHS, CPN/mental health, debt counselling, legal support, employment, housing support, education and dentistry).
  • In the case of children, additional information as to whether the child is subject to assessment needs (such as CAF/UNOCINI) or a child care/protection plan, or is a child in need.

We may also collect information from any individual/agency that has referred your family to us.

How we will use your personal information and who it will be shared with

Internal

Our volunteers discuss your support with the appropriate organiser/co-ordinators, who in turn discuss your support with their line managers. Discussions take place in a confidential setting, for the purposes of supervision and to ensure the best possible support to your family. Volunteers meeting together for peer support do not share information that may identify, or breach the confidentiality of your family.

All information provided to our board of trustees for the purpose of assessing the level of referrals, local trends or case studies shall be anonymised.

External

We will, on an anonymised basis, use your personal information to demonstrate the impact of our services. Any case study information shared will always be on anonymised basis unless we have further explicit consent from you.

We will inform funders and your health visitor (and other agencies involved with your family) that you have sought support from us (including the nature and level of such support) and provide them with [general information]. In the event your family has been referred to us, we shall share the same information with your referrer (this will include any changes to the support and informing the referrer when the support comes to an end).

We may share your personal information with our external auditors for quality auditing purposes but only in the presence of your organiser/co-ordinator and only after the auditors have providing us with all necessary written undertakings to preserve the security and confidentiality of your information.

We will share personal information with law enforcement or other authorities if required by applicable law (including, in line with our Safeguarding and Promoting the Welfare of Children/Safeguarding Adults at risks policies, where there are concerns about the safety or wellbeing of a child or adult at risk and it is considered necessary for their welfare and protection).

We will not share your personal information with any other third party without first obtaining your explicit consent.

 

How long your personal information will be kept

We will keep your personal information for 12 months after we have finished providing our support to respond to any questions, complaints or claims made by you or on your behalf, to show that we treated you fairly and/or to keep records required by law. We will not keep the information for longer than necessary. We keep different types of information for different lengths of time (further details can be found in our Information Governance Policy which is available on request).

Keeping your personal information secure

We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent your information from being accidentally lost, or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your personal information to those who have a genuine need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality. We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.

Your Rights

You have a number of important rights which you may exercise in relation to your personal information free of charge. In summary, those include rights to:

  • access your personal information and to certain other supplementary information that this Privacy Notice is already designed to address;
  • require us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold;
  • require the erasure of personal information concerning you in certain situations;
  • receive the personal information concerning you which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to a third party in certain situations;
  • object at any time to the processing of personal information concerning you for direct marketing
  • object to decisions being taken by automated means which produce legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affect you
  • object in certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information; and
  • otherwise restrict our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

For further information on each of these rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, visit the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) website at https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/.

If you would like to exercise any of the rights, please email, call or write to us using the details in ‘How to contact us’ below, let us have enough information to identify you, let us have proof of your identity and address, and let us know the information to which your request relates.

How to complain

Please report any complaint to the details set out in ‘How to contact us’ below. We hope we can resolve any query or concern you raise about our use of your information. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the ICO who may be contacted at https://ico.org.uk/concerns/ or telephone: 0303 123 1113.

How to contact us

Please contact us if you have any questions about this Privacy Notice or the information we hold about you as detailed below:

Tel 01206 854625  Email Office@home-startcjc.com