Council Tax/Benefits Privacy Statement

Glasgow City Council is a local authority established under the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994. Its head office is located at City Chambers, George Square, Glasgow G2 1DU, United Kingdom.  Contact  details for our Data Protection Officer can be found on our website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.

You are giving us personal information to allow us to:

• Compile and maintain the Council Tax List in accordance with the Local Government Finance Act 1992 and related legislation applying to Council Tax, as well as,
• Process a claim for Housing Benefit or Council Tax Reduction or a notification of a change in circumstances for either, in accordance with the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992 and related legislation to Housing Benefit and Council Tax.
• Answer queries from individuals and customers on Council tax and Housing Benefit matters.
• Process Council tax payments.

We also use your information to verify your identity where required, contact you by post, email or telephone and to maintain our records. 

We receive information about you from

• Housing Association
• Management Agent
• Solicitor
• Outgoing Owner or tenant
• Other Local Authorities
• Glasgow City Assessor
• Debt Management Partners
• Police Scotland
• Universities/Colleges
• Department for Work and Pensions
• HMRC
• Other Government Departments

We will also use the personal information in pursuit of Council Tax Payment and/or in relation to Housing Benefit administration where an application is received for:

• Council Tax Discount,
• Council Tax Reduction or
• Council Tax Exemption
• Housing Benefit

to assess eligibility and award it if entitled.

We may communicate with you and collect personal information through different methods of contact including

• Telephone
• Email
• Online forms
• Online Webchat

We will use the personal information where we are notified of a change in personal circumstances which may affect entitlement to Housing Benefit and or Council Tax Discount, Exemption or Reduction.

As part of the Council's ongoing work to support financial inclusion and tackle poverty in the city, we will use the information to identify whether you may be entitled to Housing Benefit or to other Department for Work & Pensions benefit such as Attendance Allowance, Carers Allowance, State Pension Credit, etc. and encourage or assist you to make such a claim or provide advice in relation to such a claim.

Where applicable we will use the personal information provided to allow us to also assess eligibility to School Clothing Grants, Education Maintenance Allowance, Free School Meals, Best Start Grant and any other grants administered on behalf of the Scottish Government and award if eligible.

Where applicable we will use the information provided to allow us to assess charges in relation to Home Care Services.

Where applicable we will use the personal information provided to allow us to access eligibility to any other scheme.

Where possible, new IT systems and the development of existing IT systems will make use of system generated or anonymised data in test environments. However, there may be circumstances in which test environments, their users and their developers appointed by Glasgow City Council, such as CGI, may be required to utilise your personal data in a test environment. In such circumstances, Glasgow City Council require that development and test activity comply with data protection legislation, taking reasonable steps to protect your personal data.

We will use your information to verify your identity where required, contact you by post, email or telephone and to maintain our records.

These services are provided in terms of the council's statutory functions as a local authority, more details of which can be found on our website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.  Processing your personal information is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest by the council.

We may also need to process more sensitive personal information about you for reasons of substantial public interest as set out in the Data Protection Act 2018. It is necessary for us to process it to carry out key functions as set out in law.

If you do not provide us with the information, we have asked for then we will not be able to provide this service to you.

We are legally obliged to safeguard public funds so details will be checked internally for fraud prevention and verification purposes and may be shared with other public bodies for the same purpose.  We are legally obliged to share certain data with other public bodies such as HMRC and will do so where the law requires this; we will also generally comply with requests for specific information from other regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and proportionate.  We may share your information with your Landlord, Department for Work & Pensions, Pension Services, Rent Service Scotland, TransUnion, Neighbouring Councils, Glasgow City Assessor and Electoral Registration Officer, Mag: Net Solutions, Scott & Co and Walker Love in relation to Council Tax Payment, Council Tax Benefit Claim and or Housing Benefit Claim.   Information is also analysed internally in order to provide management information, inform service delivery reform and similar purposes.  This is in accordance with the council's Information Use and Privacy Policy, the privacy statement set out in full on our website, and the provisions of our Records Management Plan approved in terms of the Public Records (Scotland) Act 2011.

The council maintains a records retention and disposal schedule which sets out how long we hold different types of information for.   This is available on the council's website at www.glasgow.gov.uk/rrds or you can request a hard copy from the contact address below.

Where you make use of the webchat function on the Council's website, encrypted transcripts are retained for a period of 16 months.

• access to your information - you have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you.
• correcting your information- we want to make sure that your personal information is accurate, complete and up to date. Therefore you may ask us to correct any personal information about you that you believe does not meet these standards.
• deletion of your information-You have the right to ask us to delete personal information about you where:

I.  you think that we no longer need to hold the information for the purposes for which it was originally obtained

II.  you have a genuine objection to our use of your personal information - see Objecting to how we may use your information below

III.  our use of your personal information is contrary to law or our other legal obligations.

Objecting to how we may use your information - You have the right at any time to tell us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes.

Restricting how we may use your information- in some cases, you may ask us to restrict how we use your personal information.  This right might apply, for example, where we are checking the accuracy of personal information that we hold about you or we are assessing the objection you have made to our use of your information.  This right might also apply if we no longer have a basis for using your personal information, but you don't want us to delete the data.  Where this right is realistically applied will mean that we may only use the relevant personal information with your consent, for legal claims or where there are other public interest grounds to do so.

Please contact us as stated above if you wish to exercise any of these rights.

If you have provided details of anyone else in your household, please make sure that you have told them that you have given their information to Glasgow City Council.  We may need to use this information, along with information provided by external organisations noted above, to assess your own entitlement to a Council Tax Discount, Exemption or Reduction or Housing Benefit. We will use this information to validate the information that you have provided. We will also use this information to contact those people where necessary. If they want any more information on how we will use their information they can visit our web site at www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.

If you do not have access to the internet you can contact us on 0141 287 1055 to request hard copies of any of the above documents.

We aim to directly resolve all complaints about how we handle personal information.  However, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office.  Contact details for our Data Protection Officer and for the ICO can be found on our website under www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy.

For more details on how we process your personal information visit www.glasgow.gov.uk/privacy