Island HomeFinder

Privacy notice

This privacy notice relates to the Island Homefinder system.

Contact details of the controller and the Data Protection Officer

The Isle of Wight Council is the data controller for the personal information you provide to Island Homefinder. The council’s Data Protection Officer can be contacted at dpo@iow.gov.uk.  You can contact the council by phone on 01983 821000, or by writing to us at County Hall, High Street, Newport, IW PO30 1UD. 

Purpose

Your personal data will be collected as part of the Island Homefinder registration process. Its collection is required so you are able to join the Isle of Wight Housing register and it will be used for the following purposes:

• To provide a self-service account for you to access the Housing register

• To create a customer record that allows us to link details of service requests to your information

• To manage your housing application

• To manage your offer of housing

Consent

Through applying to join Island Homefinder, you are providing consent to the council and its partners to process and manage your application in accordance with General Data Protection Regulation. Should you wish to withdraw your consent, you can do so at any time by contacting us by telephone (01983) 823050 or email housing@iow.gov.uk.

The processing of your information is necessary for us to be able to provide this service to you. Therefore, should you decide to revoke your consent for us to hold and process the information you provide to us, we will be unable to offer this service to you.

Disclosure

The personal details provided by you will be shared with partners of the Island Homefinder scheme. All partners of the Island Homefinder scheme are listed in the Island Homefinder Allocation Policy, which can be found here: https://www.islandhomefinder.org.uk/content/Documents.

Your personal data may be shared and verified with other departments within the Council for the recovery of any debts owed to the Council, to prevent homelessness, to assess housing needs and eligibility for social housing, for providing assistance in relation to sustaining accommodation and maximising claimants’ income, and for identifying and providing support needs. The departments include Council Tax, Benefits, Housing Services, Adult Social Services, Children’s Social Care and Housing Renewals.

The council has a data processing contract with Civica whose systems will hold your data in a secure location in the UK, hosted by trusted partners. They are only permitted to process your data in accordance with our written instructions in order to provide you with the services you need.

The Council may also be required to disclose personal information to third parties (such as the Police or Department for Work and Pensions) for the purposes of preventing or detecting crime or apprehending or prosecuting offenders.

The Council is required under Part 6 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014 to participate in the National Fraud Initiative (NFI) data matching exercise that matches electronic data within and between public and private sector bodies to prevent and detect fraud. Housing data will be provided to the Cabinet Office for NFI and will be used for cross-system and cross-authority comparison with other relevant organisations’ data for the prevention and detection of fraud.  It does not require the consent of the individuals concerned under the UK Data Protection Act 2018.

Retention

We will keep your personal data for as long as we are required to do so under relevant legislation or in accordance with our operational requirements and applicable retention schedules.

Your rights as the data subject

You have the following rights under the GDPR in relation to the information we hold about you:

• access - you have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information
• rectification - you have the right to ask us to rectify information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete
• erasure - you have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances
• restriction of processing - you have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your information in certain circumstances
• object to processing - you have the right to object to the processing of your personal data in certain circumstances
• data portability - you have the right to ask that we transfer the information you gave us to another organisation or to you in certain circumstances
• automated decisions and profiling – you have the right to prevent your information being processed and decisions being made about you solely by automated means (without any human involvement).          

If you have any queries regarding your rights as the data subject please contact the council’s Corporate Information Unit at CIU@iow.gov.uk.

Automated processing

We use software systems to analyse your application and assess your priority banding. We also use an automated system to rank bids for properties according to priority. If you believe your priority banding or ranking is wrong you can ask us to check it manually.

Complaints about your data processing

If you are not happy with the way the council is handling your personal information you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office. Email: casework@ico.org.uk; website: https://ico.org.uk; Telephone: 03031231113