Great Places Housing Group (or Great Places Housing Association) is the Data Controller of the personal data you provide. We are committed to protecting your data in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR). This notice explains what data we collect, why we collect it, who we may share it with, how long we retain it, your rights, and how to contact us or the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The majority of the information we collect is needed to help us meet our obligations as your landlord (we have a “contract” with you in the form of your tenancy agreement). We need this information to be able to make sure we are able to provide a service to you, meet your accommodation needs, meet any individual needs you may have in terms of the way we communicate with you and tailor services for you, etc. We will keep this information for the length of your tenancy, and for up to six years afterwards. This includes:
We will record further, factual information during the course of your tenancy so that we have a record of our contacts with you. This will include:
We realise that this sounds like a long list – but we do not collect any information that we do not actually need to be able to provide you with a good service and make sure you are safe in your home.
We may use your information to meet legal obligations as a social housing provider, including:
We also share your data with organisations providing services on our behalf, such as emergency call handlers, repairs and compliance contractors, investment and maintenance surveyors. All partners are contractually bound to protect your data.
In certain circumstances, we may share sensitive personal data (special category data including ethnicity, disability, health, sexual orientation, and other EDI characteristics) with third parties. This is done only when legally justified or necessary to protect vital interests or deliver services. Examples include:
All third parties must comply with strict data protection obligations and will only receive the minimum necessary information.
When you contact our offices, you will be asked to verify yourself by asking some security questions – this is to make sure we don’t give your personal information to anyone else by accident. If you want a relative or a support worker to be able to talk to us on your behalf, we will need you to sign an advocate agreement which gives us your consent to do so.
If you access your account using the self-service portal on our website, you will be required to enter a username and password – it’s important that you keep this safe to protect your own information. We do not have a copy of your password – but we can help you to reset it if you lose or forget it.
Under data protection law, you have a number of rights that you can exercise if you are unhappy with the way your data is being used, or wish to know more about the data we hold about you. Where you contact us about one of the following rights, we will action your request within 1 calendar month unless the request is complicated or large scale – in which case we may contact you to notify you if we require an additional month to comply with your request. There is no charge associated with any of these rights.
You can exercise any of these rights by contacting the Data Protection Officer (details below)
| Right | What this right involves and how to exercise it |
|---|---|
| Right to Withdraw Consent | Where you have given your consent for your data to be processed, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. |
| Right of Access | You have the right to request a copy of all of your personal data that we process (as listed above). This request can be made in writing, by email, in person, over the phone, or via the online form on our website. We will need to verify your identity before we process your request. |
| Right to Rectification | You have the right to have any incorrect data that we hold about you corrected, or any incomplete data finalised. |
| Right to Erasure | If you believe that the data we are processing is no longer necessary, or we no longer have a legal basis for processing it, you can request that your data is permanently erased. |
| Right to Restriction of Processing | If you believe that the data we are processing is inaccurate, or that we are processing it unlawfully, you can request that we temporarily restrict the use of that data until we can establish whether it should be permanently rectified or erased. |
| Right to Data Portability | You can request that your personal data is provided, via a commonly used, machine-readable format, to another data controller. |
| Right to Object | If you feel that we do not have a legitimate lawful basis for processing your personal data, you can object to the processing which may result in us no longer processing specific categories of data.
You also have a specific right to object to your personal data being processed for the purposes of direct marketing if you do not wish to receive marketing communication from the Data Controller. |
| Rights in relation to Automated Decision Making | If a decision is made about you based solely on automated processing, you have the right to request a “human” review of this decision. |
If your personal data is being processed on our behalf by any third party companies, we will notify them if you exercise any of the rights above to ensure that they comply with your request.
Great Places Housing Group
2a Derwent Avenue
Manchester
M21 7QP
Tel: 0161 447 5000
Email: DataProtection@greatplaces.org.uk
If you are dissatisfied with our data handling, you may lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office:
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
Tel: 0303 123 1113
Email: casework@ico.org.uk
Web: www.ico.org.uk
If you or someone you know would like a copy of this document in any other format, please contact the Data Protection Officer.
