Children's Social Care

In order to comply with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), where personal data relating to a data subject is collected, Lancashire County Council would like to provide you with the following details.

Identity and contact details of the data controller

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Contact details of the data protection officer

Our Data Protection Officer is Paul Bond. You can contact him at dpo@lancashire.gov.uk or Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Purposes for processing

Lancashire County Council Children's Social Care services work with children and families in Lancashire who are in need of support or protection.

Whenever you get in touch with us either in person, by phone or online, we’ll usually need your basic contact details: name, address, telephone number, email address together with enough information about your enquiry to be able to help you quickly and effectively.

If you receive or have received social care and support from Lancashire County Council, we will hold a social care record about you. This is stored in a secure electronic database, and we may also hold some based paper based information about you.

We use your personal information to:

safeguard and support children, and to monitor their progress
enable integrated working with other teams and organisations to ensure you receive the right support at the right time
plan and provide the most appropriate level of support to you and your family
support you to access relevant support and advice, services and groups
prepare information for the courts as required
evaluate and quality assure the services we provide, and improve our policies on children’s social care
inform future service provision and the commissioning of services
analyse service provision and effectiveness, and model patterns of service involvement to support future service delivery planning
undertake our statutory duties to refer families as required to local housing authorities to reduce homelessness

Strengthening Families & Protecting Children Programme

Lancashire County Council will also be participating in an evaluation designed to measure the impact of the Strengthening Families & Protecting Children programme. This programme, and subsequent evaluation has been commissioned by the DfE, and will be carried out by external consultants (WhatWorks in Children's Social Care).

Anonymised data will be provided to assist in this evaluation, and where specific qualitative data may need to be collected from individuals, consent will be sought at the outset.

Category of personal data being processed

Personal data (information relating to a living, identifiable individual)
Special category personal data (racial, ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation)

Legal basis for processing personal data

The legal basis for processing your personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(a) Consent: the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose.

(c) Legal Obligation: the processing is necessary for you to comply with the law. You must reference the applicable legislation if you wish to rely on this basis for processing.

(e) Public Task: the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law. You must reference the applicable task/function and its' basis in law if you wish to rely on this basis for processing.

Legal basis for processing special categories of personal data

The legal basis for processing your special categories of personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(a) The data subject has given explicit consent to the processing of this personal data.

(f) Processing is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims or whenever courts are acting in their judicial capacity.

(g) Processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest.

(h) Processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive or occupational medicine, for the assessment of the working capacity of the employee, medical diagnosis, the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services.

The UK GDPR Article 6 (1) (c) and (e) and UK GDPR Article 9 (2) (g) and (h) lawful basis are relied upon by virtue of the following legislation:

Children Acts 1989 and 2004
Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000
Care Standards Act 2000
United Nations Convention on the Rights of The Child
Human Rights Act 1998
Adoption and Children Act 2002
Children Act 2004
Data Protection Act 2018
Children and Families Act 2014
Children Act (2004) Part 2 Section 10 - Co-operation to improve well-being
Children's Act 1989 Section 27 – Co-operation between authorities
Working Together to Safeguard Children Statutory framework: legislation relevant to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children – Statutory Guidance July 2018

LCC may process personal data to ensure the safeguarding of children and individuals at risk and rely on UK GDPR Article 9 (2) (g) Substantial Public Interest by virtue of the following legislation:

Data Protection Act (2018) Schedule 1 Part 2 (18) Safeguarding of children and of individuals at risk.

Recipients of the data

teams within Lancashire County Council working to improve outcomes for children and young people
commissioned providers of local authority services (such as Independent Foster Care Agencies, Children’s Homes, accommodation Providers, Supported Lodgings Providers, Residential Special Schools and Secure accommodation, Substance misuse workers)
schools
partner organisations necessary, which may include health visitors, midwives, district councils, housing providers, police, probation service, school nurses, doctors and mental health workers (please note, this list is not exhaustive).
government departments including the Department of Education, Department of Work and Pensions, and the Home Office
Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunal Service
Ofsted (in the event of a local authority inspection of children’s services)
We will share personal information with law enforcement or other authorities if required by applicable law

Recipients of data specific to the Strengthening Families & Protecting Children Programme

National Probation Service
Change, Grow, Live
We Are With You
LSCFT
What Works in Children's Social Care/DfE

Information we share

In the course of providing support for a child, young person and their family we collect the following personal information:

personal information (such as name, address, contact details, date of birth, gender)
special category characteristics (such as ethnicity, disability, mental health status, and drug and alcohol use)
personal identifiers (including NHS numbers)
details of family relationships, including those of extended family and friends
reasons for support (such as what is working well and what you are worried about)
assessment and plan information for children in need (such as further details of your issues and challenges, and how we are going to work together to bring about the changes required)
information gathered during child protection processes (during Section 47 enquiries/investigations and Child Protection Conferences)
episodes of being looked after (such as important dates and information on placements)
outcomes for looked after children, such as whether health and dental assessments are up to date, strengths and difficulties questionnaire scores and personal education plans
adoption information, including dates of court orders and decisions and information relating to post-adoption support provided
information on care leavers, including their education and employment status and the type of accommodation they are living in

We also obtain personal information from the following other sources:

details of any young person reported missing from home, from the Police
referral and involvement information from partner organisations
court decisions relating to our statutory legal duties
details of any child or young person in care placed in Lancashire by other local authorities

Any transfers to another country

Your personal data would only ever be transferred to another country in specific circumstances where there was a lawful basis for Lancashire County Council to do so.

Retention periods

Lancashire County Council will only store your information for as long as is legally required or in situations where there is no legal retention period they will follow established best practice.

File type	Security	Retention period
Children Looked After	Personal data is held on secure systems maintained by Lancashire County Council.	Files of children who are looked after, or who cease to be looked after, before the age of 18 years, should be retained completely intact until the 18 Birthday is reached. 75 years from date of birth or if the child has died before reaching 18 years, for the period of 15 years from the date of death or when the age of 18 would have been achieved, whichever is the later. Any historic family records previously created on children who are look after for 75 years from the date of birth of the youngest child will be stored by records management team.
Child Protection Records	Personal data is held on secure systems maintained by Lancashire County Council.	Records of children where child protection enquiries took place under Section 47 of the Children Act 1989, but did not lead to registration, will have a retention period of 20 years following closure of the case. If the child dies within the retention period the records remain archived for the full retention period. Records of children who have been on the Child Protection Register will have a retention period of 75 years from the date of birth of the child. . If the child dies within the retention period the records remain archived for the full retention period.
Records of children not currently looked after but subject to a legal order to the authority requiring supervision (Supervision Order or Family Assistance Order the Children Act 1989)	Personal data is held on secure systems maintained by Lancashire County Council.	75 years from date of birth or if the child has died before reaching 18 years, for the period of 15 years from the date of death or when the age of 18 would have been achieved, whichever is the later.
Children’s records other than those referred to above, - cases closed after initial assessment; - children receiving Family Centre support; - other Children In Need and Family Support cases;	Personal data is held on secure systems maintained by Lancashire County Council.	10 years after the case is closed
Records in respect of children in Children’s Homes as described in Schedule 4 of the Children’s Homes Regulations 2001 Amendment 2011	Personal data is held on secure systems maintained by Lancashire County Council.	50 years after the child is discharged from the home The legislative retention period for these records is 15 years but Lancashire policy is to keep some of them for 50 years.
Records on persons cautioned or convicted of an offence under Schedule 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 or persons posing a risk to children.	Personal data is held on secure systems maintained by Lancashire County Council.	100 years from the creation of the record.
Records of those Children who have been detained under Section 2 or 3 of the Mental Health Act 1983	Personal data is held on secure systems maintained by Lancashire County Council.	20 years after no further treatment considered necessary or 8 years after the patient’s death if the patient died while still receiving treatment

Your rights

You have certain rights under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), these are the right:

to be informed via Privacy Notices such as this.
to withdraw your consent. If we are relying on your consent to process your data then you can remove this at any point.
of access to any personal information the council holds about yourself. To request a copy of this information you must make a subject access request in writing. You are entitled to receive a copy of your personal data within 1 calendar month of our receipt of your subject access request. If your request is complex then we can extend this period by a further two months, if we need to do this we will contact you. You can request a subject access request, either via a letter or via an email to Information Governance Team, address below.
of rectification, we must correct inaccurate or incomplete data within one month.
to erasure. You have the right to have your personal data erased and to prevent processing unless we have a legal obligation to process your personal information.
to restrict processing. You have the right to suppress processing. We can retain just enough information about you to ensure that the restriction is respected in future.
to data portability. We can provide you with your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine readable form when asked.
to object. You can object to your personal data being used for profiling, direct marketing or research purposes.
in relation to automated decision making and profiling, to reduce the risk that a potentially damaging decision is taken without human intervention.

If you want to exercise any of these rights then you can do so by contacting:

Information Governance Team
Lancashire County Council
PO Box 78
County Hall
Preston
PR1 8XJ

Or email: dpo@lancashire.gov.uk

To ensure that we can deal with your request as efficiently as possible you will need to include your current name and address, proof of identity (a copy of your driving licence, passport or two different utility bills that display your name and address), as much detail as possible regarding your request so that we can identify any information we may hold about you, this may include your previous name and address, date of birth and what council service you were involved with.

Further information

If you would like more information about this specific service then please contact enquiries@lancashire.gov.uk.

For more information about how we use personal information see Lancashire County Council's full privacy notice.

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact the Information Governance team who will investigate the matter.

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ or email: dataprotection@lancashire.gov.uk

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).