This privacy notice explains how Coventry City Council will use your personal information you when you apply for Discretionary Housing Payments and Community Support Grants.
We collect this information because the following laws require us to as part of our work.
- Discretionary Financial Assistance regulations 2001
- Community Support Grant / Local Welfare Provision
What we do with your information
We collect this information so that we can:
- Find out if you should receive the awards listed above
- Make payments of the awards
- Provide you with the correct services
- Help us develop and improve our services
- Send reports to Government departments
- Detect and prevent fraud and error
- For the detection and prevention of crime
- Make sure public money is correctly used
An automatic decision is made to decide if you meet the qualifying criteria. You can ask for this decision to be looked at by a person and explained to you. To do this email DGAteam@coventry.gov.uk
Who we share your information with
We share your information with:
- The Department for Work and Pensions - to send them reports and to detect and prevent fraud
- Other Council departments - to improve services, to carry out research, to monitor equality, to protect public funds and find out if you should get any more help
- Your landlord - if your payments are being made to your landlord we will share information regarding payments only.
- The Police - to enable safeguarding and to detect and prevent crime
- The Cabinet office (who are a government department) - for the purposes of a data matching exercise called the National Fraud Initiative. The purpose of the exercise is to detect fraud and error. The Council is legally required to participate in this exercise.
- Private sector suppliers - to supply the household items and utilities in line with Community Support Grant applications.
How long will we keep your information?
We will only keep your information for as long as we need to so that we can give you the service you need, unless we have to for legal reasons. This is normally for seven years.
Your rights
You have the right to:
- Ask to see the information we hold about you
- Have any inaccuracies in your data corrected
- Have information erased
- Restrict processing of information we hold about you
- Complain to the Information Commissioner's Office ( information below)
To exercise any of these rights please contact the Benefits Service and/or email benefits@coventry.gov.uk (mark your email as Data Request).
Complaints
You have the right to complain if you are unhappy with the way your request is handled or disagree with a decision made by the Council about your data. If you want to make a complaint you can contact the Data Protection Team (DPO) and ask for a review of the decision.
If you are still not satisfied you can contact the Information Commissioner's Office at:
The Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF.
Date of last review: March 2023