Why We Need Information

Swindon Borough Council is a large organisation that provides a wide range of services to the community - services for you. In order to do this, the Council needs to keep essential personal information about people who use their services. This information helps us to plan, develop and provide services for the community, to provide statistical and budgetary information, to supervise and manage staff and to provide a helpful and efficient response when customers request advice or assistance. Much of this information is now held as data on computer files, but we also keep information in manual recording systems.

What Personal Information We Hold

Because of the many different services that the Council provides, eg: education, social services, leisure, tourism, libraries and housing etc the nature and amount of personal information that we need to collect and keep about you will vary depending on the services you are using or receiving from us. In other words, 'personal information' may be just your name and address, or it may include details of members of your family, carers, council staff who are working with you and other professionals who are known to be providing you with a service or services. Under the new legislation, personal information now includes 'sound and image' data, eg: data captured by CCTV (closed circuit television) or held on video tape etc.

How We Hold the Information

Most of the information that we obtain will be provided by you, but depending on the type of service you use, we may also need information from other government, voluntary or private organisations, your family, carers or other individuals. All of this information will help us to provide you with the best services to meet your needs.

Taking Care of Your Personal Information

Swindon Borough Council is a responsible body committed to maintaining the highest standards of security and confidentiality in respect of personal information. The new legislation* builds on and improves existing data protection and other personal record legislation that the Council already adheres to.

The Council, along with many other organisations and individuals must notify (register) its use of personal data with the Information Commissioner, who has national responsibility for ensuring that personal data is obtained, held and processed in accordance with the law.

The Council has a Data Protection Officer and a number of nominated representatives who are able to act on her behalf.

In respect of your personal data, we will endeavour to:

• Tell you, whenever practicable and possible, the purposes for which your information will be kept and used
• Only use your personal information for the purposes that we have said we will
• Only keep adequate, relevant personal information about you, which is not excessive to meet our purposes, ie: we will only keep the personal information that we need to in order to provide services to you, or to meet our legal and statutory obligations
• Take all reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is accurate and up-to-date, (please help us to do this by keeping us informed if any of your details change)
• Delete/destroy personal information about you from our systems promptly and in accordance with our retention and destruction policies
• Take all reasonable steps to guard against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, your personal information and to ensure that employees authorised to access and process personal information are aware of data protection legislation and the Council's security and confidentiality requirements

*This refers to the Data Protection Act 1998. These pages are not a full statement of the law and it does not detail all of your rights.