Privacy notices

Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council privacy notices.

Children and Families Services

This Privacy Notice is designed to help you understand how and why the Children and Families Service processes your personal data. This notice should be read in conjunction with the Council’s Corporate Privacy Notice.

Who are we? 

Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council is a ‘Data Controller’ as defined by Article 4(7) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).  

Everyone working for Children’s Services has a legal duty to keep and process information about you in accordance with the law. 

The Children and Families Directorate includes lots of services that the Council provides to support and safeguard children and young people. This includes social work teams, occupational therapy, early help, school nursing and health visiting services and social care finance. 

Sometimes information about carers is collected on our behalf by an organisation called Carers Together. This is because they do some of our carer’s assessments. This guide also applies to any information that Carers Together records on our behalf. 

If there is anything in this guide that you do not understand, please speak to your social worker, health visitor, early years practitioner or Intervention Worker. 

The Council has appointed a Data Protection Officer. Their contact details are:

Data Protection Officer
Redcar and Cleveland House
Kirkleatham Street
Redcar
TS10 1RT

InformationGovernance@redcar-cleveland.gov.uk  or you can call 01642 774774.

What information do you collect about me and my family?

We collect and record information about children and young people who may be in need of services or in need of protection. We also keep records about carers. This includes:

  • People who are referred to Children’s Services
  • People who contact us to ask for help or advice
  • People who have had their needs for services or protection assessed by us. 

We may collect the following personal information about children, young people and their families:

  • Basic details about you, for example, name, gender, address, date of birth, email address, phone number
  • Unique identifiers, such as National Insurance Number, NHS number, and Unique Pupil Number
  • Records of contact we have had with you, such as notes from visits or telephone conversations, appointments, letters and emails
  • Notes and reports about you and your family’s relevant circumstances
  • Records of assessments, plans and reviews
  • Details on the support or services that have been arranged for your family
  • Copies of financial information to calculate monetary support you may be entitled to
  • Information about your direct payments, including how you have spent your payment
  • Education information, such as attendance and exclusion, personal education plans, progress and achievement

We may also collect the following special category data:

  • Race or ethnic origin
  • Religious or philosophical beliefs
  • Genetic data 
  • Sexual orientation
  • Medical (physical or mental health details)
  • Criminal offences (including alleged offences) 

Why do we collect your personal information? 

We use your personal information to:

  • Safeguard and support children, and to monitor their progress
  • Enable integrated working with other teams and organisations to ensure you receive the right support at the right time
  • Plan and provide the most appropriate level of support for you and your family
  • Support you to access relevant support, advice, services, and groups
  • Prepare information for the Family Courts, as required
  • Evaluate and quality assure the services we provide, and improve our policies on children’s social care
  • Inform future service provision and the commissioning of services

Who do we share this information with or receive it from?

Personal information is provided directly by yourself. However, if you are not able to provide the necessary information, we may ask your family members, or will talk to other professionals who have been helping you. This may include:

  • Police
  • Education establishments
  • Other Local Authorities
  • Partner organisations, including commissioned providers
  • NHS organisations, including GP practices
  • Courts
  • Information about carers is sometimes collected by an organisation called Carer’s Together on our behalf. This is because they do some of our carer’s assessments.

We may need to share relevant information about you so that we can work with other organisations to meet your needs.  We must also share information if we think that children and young people may be at risk of neglect or abuse.  We may therefore share personal data with the following organisations:

  • Education establishments – to ensure children are adequately safeguarded and are accessing education
  • Private, community and voluntary sector organisations that may provide you or your family with care and support
  • Government Organisations e.g. Ofsted, CQC – to share concerns and meet our statutory obligations
  • NHS organisations - when we are working with them to meet your health and social care needs
  • Housing providers – if your family have housing needs
  • Police - if we think that you, or someone in your family, are at risk of neglect or abuse
  • Fire Service - if we think that your home is at risk of fire
  • Other Local Authorities - if you are moving, or have moved between areas and we need to make sure that your family support or protection continues after you have moved
  • Our legal services provider or the Courts – if there is a need to make a legal representation in relation to your child
  • Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Liberata PLC (who provide Council Tax and Benefits services on behalf of the Council) – to prevent fraud or if we are supporting you with benefits claims
  • South Tees Safeguarding Children Partnership (STSCP) – when undertaking audits of social care cases
  • The National Fraud Initiative – for the purpose of crime prevention and detection of fraud.

Information will only be shared with third parties if they have a genuine and lawful need for it. Anyone who receives information from us has a legal duty to keep it confidential.

How long do we keep your information for?

The Council’s records retention and disposal schedule explains how long we normally retain different categories and types of information, including personal data. The law may also specify a minimum amount of time we have to retain certain information. 

What is our lawful basis for processing your information?

Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council relies on the following lawful bases to process your personal data:

  • UK GDPR Article 6(c) - Legal obligation: processing is necessary to comply with the law, or;
  • UK GDPR Article 6(e) - Public task: processing is necessary to perform a task in the public interest or for official functions.

Or;

UKGDPR Article 6(a) – Consent: the data subject has given consent for their data to be processed. 

When processing special category data, the Council will rely on the following lawful bases:

UK GDPR Article 9(2)(h) – processing is necessary for the provision of health and social care services meeting Schedule 1, Part 1 of the Data Protection Act 2018 as below:

  • (2) Health or social care purposes, or;

UK GDPR Article 9(2)(g) - processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest meeting Schedule 1, Part 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018 as below:

  • (18) Safeguarding of children and of individuals at risk

The legislations, policies and guidance that relate to this service includes, but is not limited to:

  • The Children Act 2004
  • The Children and Families Act 2014
  • The Children and Social Work Act 2017
  • Working Together to Safeguard Children 2018

Early Help 

We record your personal information to enable us to provide the right early help interventions and support to you and your children. This includes a wide range of LA services which we have a public duty or legal obligation to provide such as: Health Visiting and School Nursing, early childhood services through family hubs, whole family support through our Intervention teams, universal positive activities through the youth service and specialist support for pre-school children which SEND. 

Some families that we intensively support in Early Help are attached to the ‘Supporting Families Programme’, and their progress is tracked in order to evaluate the effectiveness of our help. In order to do this, we need to share information within the Council and with our partners. 

The personal data of individuals and families on this programme is linked with information from public agencies such as the NHS and health organisations, Department for Work and Pensions, the Police, Education and the Youth Justice Board. 

The data is anonymised to reduce the risk of individuals being identified and is only shared with IFF Research on behalf of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) and the Department for Education, as part of the Early Help and Supporting Families National Insights Data Collection.  The aim of this is to collect data on all families worked with by early help services, to better understand issues faced by families and the changes that support has brought about. 

Multi-agency Children’s Hub

Redcar and Cleveland Multi-agency Children's Hub (MACH) is the single point of contact for seeking advice, guidance, support and direct services in relation to children and families living in the borough. The MACH aims to ensure that children and families receive the right services at the right level at the right time.

We collect personal information directly from individuals and we received information from members of the public and organisations such as police, health providers, public health services, schools, academies and other education providers, other local authorities, probation services, housing providers, and voluntary sector groups. 

We use your personal data to provide a multi-agency service to ensure children and families can access the services that are most appropriate to them, to protect and keep children and young people safe from harm, to help prevent, detect or investigate crime against a child or young person, and to help maintain wider public safety. 

Your Rights

You have a number of rights that you may exercise in relation to your personal data. Some of the rights do not apply automatically and may not be available in certain circumstances where a lawful exception applies.

  • You have a right to access your personal data. You can request a copy of personal data that we hold about you and ask us to explain how we use your data. 
  • You have a right to object to processing of your personal data. You have an absolute right to stop your data being used for direct marketing. In other cases where the right to object applies, we may be able to continue using your data if we have a compelling reason for doing so. 
  • If we are relying on consent as the lawful basis to process your data you can withdraw your consent at any time, and we will stop further processing. 
  • You have a right to request the restriction or suppression of your personal data. 
  • You have a right to have your personal data erased, if we no longer have a legitimate use for it. This right is sometimes called the ‘right to be forgotten’. 
  • You have a right to rectification of your personal data if the information we hold in relation to you is inaccurate or incomplete. 
  • You have a right not to be subject to any decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal or similarly significant effects. You can request human intervention or challenge any solely automated decision-making that significantly affects you. 

 

If you would like to request access to your personal data or exercise any of your other data protection rights, please contact the Information Governance Team:

Information Governance 

Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council

Redcar and Cleveland House

Kirkleatham Street

Redcar

TS10 1RT 

Email: InformationGovernance@redcar-cleveland.gov.uk 

Telephone: 01642 774 774 

You can seek advice and have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO is an independent body set up to uphold information rights in the UK. You can contact them through the ICO website www.ico.org.uk, their helpline on 0303 123 1113, or in writing to:

Information Commissioner’s Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF 

For more information about how the Council uses your data, including your privacy rights and the complaints process, please see our Corporate Privacy Notice.