Fair processing notices - Household Support Fund – Water Support scheme

To comply with data protection legislation, we need to tell you how we use the personal data we hold about you.  

Stoke-on-Trent City Council is the data controller for the personal information you have given to us for the purposes of assessing eligibility, administering and making payments under the Severn Trent water support scheme via the Household Support Fund.

We collect and process the personal data that you provide to us when completing your application for support with your water charges. The main purpose for processing your personal information is to assess whether you are eligible to receive financial support, and if so, to advise Severn Trent to provide an award to you, via way of a credit to your water account.

We will only use or share your data when we are allowed to do so by relevant legislation. We will carry out checks with Severn Trent water for verification purposes to confirm that are you are eligible for an award.

We will only keep your personal data for as long as it is needed for the purposes of administering the scheme and for audit and payment purposes.

Data protection legislation provides you with certain rights. Not all of these rights will be available to you in all situations. Where we are under a legal duty to use data for a particular purpose you will not have the right to prevent it being used in that way.

We may share data with our internal audit team to evaluate the effectiveness of the organisation’s risk management, control and governance processes.  We may also share your data with the council's fraud team to help to prevent and detect fraud.

A full list of the rights you may have under data protection law is given below, not all rights apply in all situations: 

• you can ask to see the information that we hold about you
• you can ask what is being done with the information that we hold about you
• you can ask to have some data that we hold about you deleted
• you can ask us to review a decision made about you by a computer, and ask for a new decision to be made without a computer
• you can ask us to stop processing data that we hold about you, but only in limited circumstances, such as processing for research, historical or direct marketing reasons
• you can ask us to make changes to inaccurate data
• you can ask us to move your information somewhere else
• you can ask us to restrict or limit what we do with your data, for example if you believe that data we hold is inaccurate, or you believe the processing in unlawful

If you want to exercise your rights under data protection law you can email foi@stoke.gov.uk or write to Information Rights Team, Floor 2, Civic Centre, Glebe Street, Stoke-on-Trent ST4 1HH 
  
If you wish to complain about how your personal information has been handled by the city council, contact the information rights team in the first instance, on the details provided above.

If you remain dissatisfied the Information Commissioner’s Office can be contacted:

Information Commissioner's website

You have the right to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office at any time.