Equality and Cohesion Service

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

As an employer, service provider and provider of public functions we have responsibilities under the Equality Act 2010 and Public Sector Equality Duty.

The Equality Act 2010 has defined nine protected characteristics:  age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation and marriage and civil partnership status

We have a duty to:

  • Eliminate discrimination
  • Advance equality of opportunity
  • Foster good relations between people (community cohesion)

Public authorities have specific duties under the Equality Act to help them comply with the public sector equality duty, including a requirement to prepare and publish equality objectives at least every four years. 

The County Council's Equality Objectives were updated in April 2020 and aligned to the council's corporate strategy; 'Our Vision for Lancashire'.

The County Council also have a specific duty under the Equality Act 2010 to publish our Equality Information and Gender Pay Gap Report annually including statistical data on the equalities profile of its applicants and workforce.

Resettlement Programme

We will collect your information when you arrive in Lancashire through a Resettlement Scheme so that we can offer you services to settle and integrate into the county. This may be as part of one of the UK Government's national resettlement schemes for refugees or through the asylum dispersal system, depending on your route of entry into the UK.

We use this information to:

  • Help Lancashire County Council and its commissioned partners to fulfil their support obligations, as funded by the Home Office and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
  • Provide you with services you need
  • Help us to develop and improve our services
  • Complete reports for Government departments

Category of personal data being processed

  1. Personal data (information relating to a living, identifiable individual)
  2. 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.

We have a legal obligation to process under Local Government Act 1972, Crime & Disorder Act 1998, Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime & Policing Act 2014; Housing Act 1998, Homeless Reduction Act 2017.

In Addition, the processing is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law:

  • Section 59(1)(e) of the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002
  • Powers to provide support in terms of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999.
  • Nationality and Borders Act 2022

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:

(b) Processing is necessary for the purposes of carrying out the obligations and exercising specific rights of the controller or of the data subject in the field of employment and social security and social protection law

(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.

We have a legal obligation to process under Local Government Act 1972, Crime & Disorder Act 1998, Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime & Policing Act 2014; Housing Act 1998, Homeless Reduction Act 2017.

In Addition, the processing is necessary for us to perform a task in the public interest or for our official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law:

  • Section 59(1)(e) of the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002
  • Powers to provide support in terms of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. This is called Public Task

Where Lancashire County Council relies on UK GDPR Article 9 (2) (g) Substantial Public Interest it does so by virtue of the following legislation:

  • Data Protection Act (2018) Schedule 1 Part 2 (6) Statutory etc and government purposes
  • Data Protection Act (2018) Schedule 1 Part 2 (8) Equality of opportunity or treatment

Recipients of the data

  • Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council
  • Blackpool Council
  • Border Force
  • Burnley Council
  • Calico
  • Chorley Council
  • DA Languages
  • Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
  • Fylde Council
  • Global Link
  • Granicus
  • Home Office
  • Hyndburn Council
  • Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board
  • Lancashire County Council
  • Lancaster Council
  • Lancashire Police
  • Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service
  • Oncall – for translation and interpretation services where these are required
  • Palantir
  • Pendle Council
  • Preston Council
  • Regional Strategic Migration Partnership
  • Ribble Valley Borough Council
  • Rossendale Council
  • SERCO
  • South Ribble Council
  • The Salvation Army
  • West Lancashire Borough Council
  • Wyre Borough Council
  • All the colleges that provide ESOL in Lancashire

Information we share

  • Full names
  • Contact details
  • Date Of Birth
  • Marital status
  • Country of birth
  • Case File Numbers
  • NHS number
  • National Insurance Numbers
  • GP details
  • Volunteer/Participant Unique Identifier
  • Residential postcode and address
  • Gender
  • Next of kin/emergency contact, including relatives living overseas  
  • Arrival date in the UK and/or Lancashire

We also collect the following information from you to help us provide you with the services you need:

  • Language/skills and abilities  
  • Benefits received
  • Details of and housing needs or issues experienced
  • Referral source
  • Highest level of educational / work-related qualification
  • First language and second language
  • ESOL/English Level
  • Employment status and employment plans
  • Reason for volunteering
  • Financial circumstances
  • Name of schools currently attended, support needed to attend and school attendance record
  • Special Educational Needs including additional financial support
  • Support worker details
  • Community resources being accessed

Any transfers to another country

  • No
  • The information captured by the Granicus e-form system is encrypted where it is captured, during transit, and whilst "at rest" on the e-form servers. The e-form system is hosted on Amazon Web Services servers based in Europe.

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 Description  Security Retention period
Case file Case file for each individual that the service supports Held on secure server within Lancashire Council /Move It System

Home for Ukraine is held on Foundry with DLUHC

End of interaction plus 5 years
Refugee and Asylum Casework Database Database designed to facilitate the secure storage and legal, secure sharing of personal data between participating organisations supporting individuals Casework Management System (currently in development) End of interaction plus 5 years
Oncall translation and interpretation records Database designed to facilitate the secure storage and legal, secure sharing of personal data between Oncall and Lancashire County Council The data are held on Nextgen Personal Data in both physical and written form are retained for 1 year for documents with exception to financial data where it is required to be retained for 7 years by public tax entity laws.

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 

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 project then please contact the Refugee Integration Team at RITTeam@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)