Braintree District Council is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. As a billing authority for the Braintree district, this notice is provided to clarify what information the council needs to collect, store and process in order to administer enforce Council Tax.
For the purposes of data protection, Braintree District Council is the data controller for the personal information you provide. All personal information is held and processed by Braintree District Council in accordance with Data Protection legislation.
Categories of personal data
The Council will process some or all of the following personal information:
Full Names, titles, address including postcode
Contact details such as telephone numbers, and email addresses.
Move In and move out date, forwarding addresses
Details of family composition and dependants.
Financial such as bank account details for payments
Other relevant information needed to assess your situation to process applications for discounts or exemptions where appropriate.
Where there is a dispute about Council Tax liability for your property, we made need to collect additional information such as details of your household circumstances.
The personal data we process for discounts and /or exemptions may include sensitive or other special categories of personal data such as mental and physical health, medication/treatment received
Purpose for processing
Your personal data will be processed to administer, collect and enforce Council Tax and where applicable, assess claims for council tax discounts. Health data may be requested in order to assess your eligibility for council tax discounts or exemptions.
If you choose to pay by direct debit, we will process your back account details for this purpose.
Lawful basis for processing personal data
The lawful basis for processing your personal data is as follows:
Compliance with legal obligations – information is required by the Council in order to carry out its duties under the:
Local Government Finance Act 1992
The Council Tax (Administration and Enforcement) (Amendment) Regulations 1992
Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014 (requires us to share information with the Cabinet Office as part of the National Fraud Initiative)
Social Security Administration Act 1992
Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007
Providing accurate information
It is important that we hold accurate and up to date information about you in order to assess your needs and deliver appropriate services. If any of your details change please tell us as soon as possible so that we can update your records. It is an offence to give false statements, withhold any information or fail to disclose any changes in circumstances.
We will not make any decisions about you based on automated processing or send/store your data abroad.
Sharing information
To administer and enforce Council Tax collection, we may be required to share your personal information with other departments within the Council, other local authorities, government departments such as the Department of Work and Pensions, Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs, police, landlords, magistrate’s courts, debt collection agencies and enforcement agencies. We will check some of the information with other sources to ensure the information you have provided is accurate.
We are required to share council tax data with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to fulfil their statutory functions under the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 to produce statistics related to the economy, population and society and to help with the Census. Details of the information we will share and how it will be used can be viewed on the ONS website.
Where we need to disclose sensitive information such as medical details to a third party, we will do so once we have obtained your explicit consent, or where we are legally required to. We may disclose information when necessary to prevent risk of harm to an individual.
We will not disclose any information to other organisations unless we have a legal duty to release information for the purposes of preventing and detecting fraud or crime.
Braintree District Council is required by law to protect the public funds they administer. We may share information with other bodies that are responsible for auditing or administering public funds, including the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office requires councils to participate in data matching exercises to assist in the prevention and detection of fraud.
Data retention
The Council will only retain your data for as long as necessary. Personal Information provided to us will be kept for a period of 6 years after your Council tax account is closed and there is no collection of Council Tax outstanding. In some cases we are required to keep some data indefinitely. Full details of how long the Council retains information for can be found in our retention policy published on our website.
Your rights
You can read our privacy page to find out:
how we maintain the security of your information
what rights you have to access your information
how to correct or remove your information
If you have any questions or want to find out more information you can phone or email our Data Protection Officer.
If you are unhappy with how we have processed your personal information, contact the Information Commissioner's Office.
Contact details
Data Protection Officer
Braintree District Council
Causeway House
Bocking End
Braintree CM7 9 HB
01376 552525
DPO@braintree.gov.uk
