Privacy Notice - Revenues and Benefits

Your Personal Data

Who we are

We are Chorley Council and your privacy is important to us. We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation.

If you have any concerns about how the Council is handling your personal data, these can be raised with the Council's Data Protection Officer:

Chorley Council
Town Hall
Market Street
Chorley
Lancashire
PR7 1DP

Email: contact@chorley.gov.uk

We keep our privacy notice under regular review and we will place an updated version on this page. This will help ensure that you are always aware of what information we collect and how we use it.

What we need

We will only collect basic personal data about you which may include but not limited to:

full name
address including postcode
date of birth
telephone number
email address
National Insurance Number
employer details
income and capital details
financial details
health information
expenditure details
Power of Attorney details
information relating to other persons in your household
bank details
dates of occupation
details of your landlord and the amount of rent paid
IP address

Why we need it

The Council uses your personal information in order to:

administer and enforce Council Tax under the Local Government Finance Act 1992
administer and enforce National Non Domestic Rates under the Local Government Finance Act 1988
administer Housing Benefit and Council Tax Support under the Housing Benefit Regulations 2006, the Social Security Administration Act 1992, the Council Tax Reduction Schemes (Prescribed Requirements) (England) Regulations 2012 and Council Tax Reduction Scheme (Chorley) Regulations 2018
to identify and take steps to bring vacant dwellings back into use under the Local Government Finance Act 1992.

The processing of your information is necessary for compliance with the legal obligations contained in these Acts. We will not be able to process your claim without this information.

We will also keep contact telephone numbers and e-mail addresses so that we can contact you.

What we do with it

Your personal information will be treated as confidential but it may be shared with other Council services in order to ensure our records are accurate and up-to-date, and to improve the standard of the services we deliver. We will only use your information in ways which are permitted by the General Data Protection Regulation and the current UK Data Protection law.

We may share your information with other teams in the Council such as Council Tax, Electoral Services, Waste Services, Housing Services and Corporate Investigations in order to provide our services, carry out public tasks, to keep our records up to date, for law enforcement and to protect public interests.

This may include other local authorities and government departments or agencies carrying out their public tasks, such as the council's Collection Agents, employers, Lancashire County Council, Department of Work and Pensions, Her Majesties Revenues and Customs, the Police in carrying out criminal investigations the Cabinet Office in relation to data matching via the National Fraud Initiative.

We will not share your information unless the law allows or requires us to do so.

If you fall behind with your council tax payments, Officers may need to read your application to assist you. We may also disclose information when necessary to prevent the risk of harm to an individual.

Where we process special categories of data such as disability, we will do this on the basis of explicit consent, substantial public interest or under social security law requirements.

We have a Data Protection regime in place to oversee the effective and secure processing of your personal data. View more information on data protection.

This authority has a duty to protect the public funds it administers and may use information held about you for all lawful purposes, including but not limited to the prevention and detection of crime including fraud and money laundering and the matching of Council Tax and benefits data with other internal and external Government departments including the Department for Work and Pensions and HMRC.

The Council may also use your information for the purpose of performing any of its statutory enforcement duties. It will make any disclosures required by law and may also share your information with other bodies responsible for detecting/preventing crime including fraud or auditing/administering public funds.

There is also information about your computer hardware and software that is automatically collected by Chorley Council. This information can include: your IP address, browser type, domain names, access times and referring Web site addresses. This information is used by Chorley Council for the operation of the service, to maintain quality of the service, and to provide general statistics regarding use of the Chorley Council Web site. This information may also be shared with other internal and external Government Departments including the Department for Works and Pensions for the prevention or detection of crime including fraud and money laundering.

We will not disclose your personal information to third parties for marketing purposes.

We may share your data with South Ribble Borough Council as part of the shared services arrangements.

What are your rights

You have the right to:

request a copy of your information (known as a subject access request)
request rectification or erasure of your information
request a restriction on the processing of your information
object to processing of your information
complain to the Information Commissioner's Office about the way the Council processes your information
set your browser to remove or reject cookies before using Chorley Council website

If you require further information about the use of your data or would like to exercise any of the above rights, please contact: Data Protection Officer, Chorley Council, Town Hall, Market Street, Chorley, Lancashire, PR7 1DP

Transferring information overseas

Your information will not be stored or shared outside the UK.

How long we keep your information

We will keep your information for as long as it is required by us or other regulatory bodies in order to comply with legal and regulatory requirements or for other operational reasons.

All paper records containing your personal information will be held securely until destroyed.

For further information on our policy for retaining personal information, you can request to see our retention guidelines.

Website information

Chorley Council encourages you to review the privacy statements of Web sites you choose to link to from Chorley Council so that you can understand how those Web sites collect, use and share your information. Chorley Council is not responsible for the privacy statements or other content on Web sites outside of the Chorley Council family of Web sites.

Use of Cookies

The Chorley Council Web site use "cookies" to help you personalise your online experience. A cookie is a text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Website via your web browser. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer. Cookies are uniquely assigned to you and can only be read by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you.

View more information on cookies.

Updated: December 2022