Homelessness Privacy Statement

Who we are

Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership delivers social care services on behalf of Glasgow City Council, a local authority established under the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994. Its head office is City Chambers, George Square, Glasgow G2 1DU, United Kingdom. You can contact the Data Protection Officer by post at that address or by email at: dataprotection@glasgow.gov.uk and telephone on 0141 287 1055.

Why do we need your personal information and what do we do with it?

This notice is for people who are homeless or threatened with homelessness and seeking support from Glasgow City Council. We are using your personal information to look into your circumstances, and that of other members of your household, to see what needs you have that are eligible for support, including formally determining whether you are homeless. If you are eligible for support we will then work with other agencies to put in place a plan to secure permanent housing for you and meet your support needs until that happens. We also use your information to verify your identity where required, contact you by post, email or telephone, to maintain our records, manage any funding of services and your contribution to these and to demonstrate to our own auditors and external regulators that we are providing proper services in accordance with the law.  

Where possible, new IT systems and the development of existing IT systems will make use of system generated or anonymised data in test environments.  However, there may be circumstances in which test environments, their users and their developers appointed by Glasgow City Council, such as CGI, may be required to utilise your personal data in a test environment.  In such circumstances, Glasgow City Council require that development and test activity comply with data protection legislation, taking reasonable steps to protect your personal data.

Legal basis for using your information

We provide these services to you as part of our statutory function as your local authority under the provisions of the:

• Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968
• Housing (Scotland) Act 1987
• Housing (Scotland) Act 2001
• Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and
• related legislation applying to the housing and community care needs of people who are homeless.

You can find more details of the council's role on our website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy. 

Processing your personal information is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest by the council as set out in the legislation referred to above. If you do not provide us with the information we have asked for then we will not be able to provide these services to you. 

We also need to process more sensitive personal information about you for reasons of substantial public interest as set out in the Data Protection Act 2018. It is necessary for us to process this data in order to carry out key functions as set out in the laws referred to above.

We may also process data about any criminal convictions you may have or offences you may have committed. This is because we have responsibility for the protection of children and vulnerable adults as well as a responsibility to assess your needs. Information about criminal offences or alleged offences will be processed by us where relevant to your support needs or the protection of vulnerable people.

Who do we share your information with?

We are legally obliged to safeguard public funds and will verify and check your details internally for fraud prevention. We may share this information with other public bodies (and also receive information from these other bodies) for fraud checking purposes.  We are also legally obliged to share certain data with other public bodies, such as HMRC and will do so where the law requires this.  We will generally comply with requests for specific information from other regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and appropriate.  Your information is also analysed internally to help us improve our services.

Finding a permanent home for you and supporting your social care needs often involves multi-agency support. There are many other agencies with whom we routinely share your data in order to support you. The main ones we usually share your data with for those purposes are the NHS and Registered Social Landlords. The NHS may include your G.P, any specialist whose care you are under, hospital staff, district nurses, Scottish Ambulance Service and allied professions involved in your care and support.  Registered Social Landlords are the persons or groups, such as housing associations, who hold housing stock that might be made available to you. We will need to send your details to them so they can see if they have housing available that would be suitable to meet your needs. We also routinely share information with any other provider of care and support to you, either your own private carers those being paid to provide services to you and voluntary agencies offering support.

In addition, we may share information with some other agencies depending on your individual circumstances. These include the Department of Work and Pensions in terms of benefits you may receive, Police Scotland and Scottish Fire and Rescue Service if there are concerns about your protection or risk to yourself or others and The Care Inspectorate if concerns are raised with them about services to you.  We will also share information with other council services where we are working with them to provide services to you

This data sharing will only take place when necessary to discharge our legal duties based on your individual circumstances or to deliver effective services to you. It will be done in accordance with our Information Use and Privacy Policy and covered in our full privacy statement on our website. It also forms part of our requirements in line with our Records Management Plan approved in terms of the Public Records (Scotland) Act 2011.

International transfers

We do not anticipate any need to transfer your personal data outwith the U.K. We will advise you if any such need arises and explain the reasons to you or your legal representative.

How long do we keep your information for?

We only keep your personal information for the minimum period amount of time necessary.  Sometimes this time period is set out in the law, but in most cases it is based on the business need.  We maintain a records retention and disposal schedule which sets out how long we hold different types of information for.   You can view this on our website at  www.glasgow.gov.uk/rrds (PDF) [3MB] or you can request a hard copy from the contact address stated above.

Your rights under data protection law

• access to your information - you have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you
• correcting your information - we want to make sure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date. Therefore you may ask us to correct any personal information about you that you believe does not meet these standards
• deletion of your information - you have the right to ask us to delete personal information about you where:

1. you think that we no longer need to hold the information for the purposes for which it was originally obtained
2. you have a genuine objection to our use of your personal information - see Objecting to how we may use your information below
3. our use of your personal information is contrary to law or our other legal obligations.

Objecting to how we may use your information - You have the right at any time to tell us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes. 

Restricting how we may use your information - in some cases, you may ask us to restrict how we use your personal information.  This right might apply if we no longer have a basis for using your personal information but you don't want us to delete the data. 

Where this right applies it will mean that we may only use the relevant personal information with your consent, for legal claims or where there are other public interest grounds to do so.

Please contact us as stated above if you wish to exercise any of these rights.

Information you have given us about other people

If you have provided anyone else's details to us, please make sure that you have told them that you have given their information to Glasgow City Council.  We will only use this information as part of the assessment of your need for services and to contact them in connection with delivery of any such services. If they want any more information on how we will use their information they can visit our web site at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy or email dataprotection@glasgow.gov.uk.

Complaints

We aim to directly resolve all complaints about how we handle personal information. If your complaint is about how we have handled your personal information, you can contact the Council's Data Protection Officer by email at dataprotection@glasgow.gov.uk or by telephone on 0141 287 1055.

However, you also have the right to lodge a complaint about data protection matters with the Information Commissioner's Office, who can be contacted by post at:  Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. By phone on 0303 123 1113 (local rate) or 01625 545 745. Visit the ICO website for more information on complaints.

If your complaint is not about a data protection matter you can find details on how to make a complaint about Social Work Services on our website.

More information

For more details on how we process your personal information visit www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.

If you do not have access to the internet you can contact us via telephone to request hard copies of our documents.