Cheshire East Council Customer Services Privacy Notice

Our core data protection obligations and commitments are set out in the council’s Primary Privacy Notice.

Customer Services processes personal data to carry out its functions and services. This privacy statement explains some important information about how we use your personal information. 

Using your personal Information

We collect, or obtain your personal information for the following purpose(s):

• redirect you to the appropriate officer
• providing a first point of contact for customers by telephone, face to face and by email
• giving advice and assistance to customers on a range of council services from refuse enquiries, recycling enquiries, pest control treatments, council tax enquiries, noise complaints, blue badge applications and much more
• to process a service request, query, or formal complaint, compliment, or suggestion
• processing of any payments for example council tax
• to process any Blue Badge application
• recording of telephone calls for quality monitoring, auditing purposes, training purposes and to help resolve complaints. We occasionally carry out live monitoring of calls, where we listen to calls in real time. This is done for quality, training, and auditing purposes, and to help resolve complaints.

We may contact you for feedback about how we responded to your enquiries. Our customer satisfaction survey is sent out via email with a link to the survey. You can opt out of our customer satisfaction survey using the unsubscribe link provided in the email.

Any call requiring action is logged through the appropriate system for the relevant council department / service to resolve.

The personal information collected will vary according to the service being requested or used. The list below covers the main types of personal information we collect:

• name
• address
• contact details, this may include telephone number and / or email address
• date of birth – for example for processing Housing Benefit applications
• National Insurance number or proof of ID for processing Blue Badge applications, and for Housing Benefit applications
• statistical data for example age, gender, disability
• photographs and CCTV footage within the premises for the purposes of public and staff safety and crime prevention and detection
• recordings of telephone discussions you have had with the Customer Contact centre
• details of any health conditions for the purpose of processing Blue Badge applications
• credit/debit card details (for processing only and not retained)
• specific details of your service request query, or formal complaint, compliment, or suggestion
• documents, images, and other files you may share with us as evidence relating to your service request query, or formal complaint, compliment, or suggestion

Why we are allowed to use your information

The law requires us to have a lawful basis for processing personal data.

As a public authority most of the personal data processing that we do will be necessary to perform a task carried out in the public interest, to exercise our statutory duties. This is known as public task under Article 6(1)(e) of the General Data Protection Regulation 2018 (GDPR).

Examples include:

• to register an individual for council tax purposes.
• to assess an individual’s eligibility for housing benefit.
• to process an individual’s right to vote.
• to investigate an individual’s complaint.

The majority of our functions are governed by local government legislation (Local Government Act 1972), with the legal basis being ‘public task’.

The main reasons are:

• The processing is necessary for compliance with that legislation which Cheshire East Council has to do (for example collection of Council Tax); and
• The processing is necessary for us to carry out our official public function (for example waste management).

Where customers choose to interact with the Contact Centre their personal data may be shared with the relevant council department / service for processing.

Examples include:

• Council Tax enquiries
• Housing Benefit enquiries
• Highways enquiries

Where your request is handled by another service or department of the council, and special category data is processed, this will be done under a condition for processing under Article 9 UK GDPR. To view the data protection obligations, commitments and legislation specific to individual departments / services, refer to the privacy notices page on our website.

Who we will share your information with

Customer Services pass information to other departments within the council and to our approved contractors (such as Ringway Jacobs).

We take part in the National Fraud Initiative as required by law to protect public funds. This is a data matching exercise to prevent and detect overpayments, errors and fraud. Our National Fraud Initiative page explains how this affects your personal information.

Where we get your information from

Usually from you or someone acting on your behalf.

Information can be:

• provided by other council services / officers that work with Customer Services
• provided by another member of the public
• provided by other organisations

How long we will keep your personal information

We keep Contact Centre telephone call recordings for 12 months. Call recordings are stored in the CXone server. CXone is our telephony platform.

We keep records in our Customer Relationship Management system (Microsoft Dynamics) for up to seven years depending on the nature of the query.

Complaints, compliments and suggestions are recorded in our iCaseWork system for seven years.

We use other back office systems to log data - information regarding these and their retention periods can be found on our Information Asset Register (cheshireeast.gov.uk).

How your information is stored

All information is stored electronically on secure council IT systems that have security controls with individual logins, and are password protected (with minimum security levels) with the data held on secure servers.

What happens if you don’t provide us with your information

It is very possible we will not be able to log your request, query or complaint.

Will your information be used to make automated decisions

In some cases yes, such as some forms for the Waste and Recycling department and the Blue Badge department.

When an automated system is used it reviews your responses against a scoring matrix to determine if you are eligible for the service you are applying for. The automated system is used for consistency and for the efficient processing of applications to give you a quicker outcome. The automated process can be overridden if necessary. No profiling is carried out.

Your rights

You have a number of rights regarding your personal data, including withdrawing your consent where we have asked for it. You can ask for a copy of the information we hold about you and ask us to correct anything that is wrong.

For detailed information about your rights please see our privacy notice.