This is the privacy notice for Glasgow City Council. We will use your details to provide you with the service which you or someone else have asked us to provide. We will also use your personal details for purposes of crime prevention and crime detection and/or when required by law and will share it with other public bodies for that purpose.

The organisation which is using your personal details is Glasgow City Council, a local authority established under the Local Government etc (Scotland) Act 1994 and having its head office at City Chambers, George Square, Glasgow G2 1DU (“the council”, “we” or “us”). The council is the data controller of this personal data for purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998 and is registered as a data controller with the Information Commissioner under Notification No. Z4871657.

The council has an approved  Use and Privacy Policy [37kb] which sets out the high level principles we operate to in using people’s personal data. This privacy statement describes how we presently translate those principles into practice in terms of what we will and will not do with the information we hold. It sets out the general approach we take, in each case with additional information relating to particular areas of our activity.

For most purposes, we will only process your information with your consent. In most cases, we will presume that by providing us with your details in order to obtain a service from the council, you are consenting to us using those details in order to provide that service to you. Except as set out in this privacy statement, we will not use your personal details for any other purpose without first obtaining your consent to that other purpose or purposes (you may have been asked to provide this additional consent at the time when you originally contacted us, for example in an additional section on an application form). For some regulatory activity carried out by the council, your application may require to be published and potentially discussed in open committee. This will be made clear on any relevant application forms and supporting documentation. For matters decided by council committees, the reports and minutes of these committees are normally public documents and will be made available in public libraries and on the council’s website.

The council does not sell personal details to any external organisations (the edited version of the electoral register is sold, but not technically by the council – see the About My Vote website for more details of this).

The main exception to the rule that we will not use your details for other purposes relates to the prevention of fraud. The council is under a legal obligation to safeguard public funds and so in all cases we reserve the right to check the information you have provided for accuracy, in order to detect fraud. This may involve data matching exercises where we compare different sets of data which we hold for unusual matches or discrepancies; this may also include matching council data with external data sources such as information held by credit reference agencies.

We also participate in anti-fraud data matching exercise carried out by other agencies such as the National Fraud Initiative (operated on behalf of Audit Scotland) and the Housing Benefit Matching Service (conducted on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions).We have a duty to manage public funds properly. As a result, we will use the information you provide to make sure all amounts we are owed are paid on time (for example, by identifying people who have not paid council tax and to help people who are entitled to benefits to claim them). In relation to outstanding money owed, we may also share your information with Debt Management Partners and the Courts. We may also share your information for the same purposes with other public organisations, including neighbouring councils that handle public funds, and with the Police. We may also share your details with other organisations, including credit reference agencies, for the purposes of prevention and detection of fraud and confirming who is living at a particular address.

By law we are obliged to provide information to certain other public bodies such as the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenues and Customs, courts, tribunals, hearings and other formal bodies dealing with legal processes, and various external regulatory bodies. We also have an obligation to assist in the prevention of crime and we will therefore generally supply specific information which we are asked to provide to the police or other crime detection agencies, provided we are satisfied that the request is connected to an investigation and that disclosure would be lawful and proportionate.

We work closely with a large number of other public bodies, most notably with the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board and other parts of the NHS operating in Glasgow. Information will generally only be shared with these partner bodies with your consent and you should always be made aware when services are to be provided to you on a joint basis. Moving forward, the integration of health and social care in terms of the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014 will result in more information being exchanged with the health board, the new Integration Joint Board and new Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership.

The council itself has established a network of Arms Length External Organisations (ALEOs) which broadly speaking provide services to the council which were previously carried out by council service departments. Information will be shared with the relevant ALEOs where necessary but you should normally be advised when this will happen and given the opportunity to refuse to allow this.

External contractors are appointed to process information on behalf of the council and under its instructions. All contractors which do this are appointed under written contracts requiring them to keep the personal information safe and prohibiting them from doing anything with the personal data they process for us other than following the council’s instructions.

The council carries out statistical analyses of the information which it holds in order to monitor its performance in various areas and in order to improve service delivery. These statistics, once they cannot identify any individuals, may be published or shared with other organisations or individuals. The council also conducts research and assists other bodies to conduct research using the information we hold. We may also share your information with other public bodies as part of a project to produce better population estimates for the City.

If an individual elects to make public statements relating to the council and the council holds information showing that these statements are incorrect, we may publicise the fact that we hold information contradicting that version. We may also seek your consent to publish the contradictory information; if you decline to give us this consent, we may make your refusal of this consent public.

The council will, by law, be contacted by your landlord if you are facing eviction from your home. The council has a duty to assist in these circumstances; this assistance is provided on the council’s behalf by our financial inclusion service providers. If you are threatened with eviction, you may accordingly receive an unsolicited letter from one of our financial inclusion service providers explaining that they act on the council’s behalf and outlining what assistance they can offer you.

Individual electoral registration was introduced in Scotland on 19 September 2014. Under the changes to the law supporting individual electoral registration, the Electoral Registration Officer is required to examine databases held by the council for the purposes of maintaining the electoral register. The Assessor and Electoral Registration Officer for Glasgow is a separate legal entity from the council and is separately notified with the Information Commissioner as a data controller under Registration Number Z4870986.