The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (the ‘Council’) is committed to ensuring that your personal information is protected, used lawfully and respectfully and in a transparent manner.

Who are we?

The Customer Contact Service of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham is committed to running an effective customer feedback system that demonstrates that we:

• put customers at the heart of everything we do
• listen to what they have to say and
• are responsive, fair, and transparent

The Customer Contact Service comprises of:

• Customer Experience Team (website analytics and customer feedback)
• Complaints and Information
• Customer Services (help and support)
• Registrars (registrations of births and deaths, arranging civil partnership or marriage ceremonies, and others.)
• Mobility services

The Council is a registered data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), registration number Z7517364.

The following information informs you about what we do with your information when you are in contact with Customer Contact Service.

What we do

• The Customer Experience Team is responsible for analysing customer feedback and data, generating and sharing insights to implement service improvements.

• Customer Services is responsible for answering incoming telephone calls for all enquiries, complaints and feedback relating to services provided by the council. It is also responsible for the processing of Travel and Transport permits known as Mobility Service).

• Complaints and Information Team maintain responsibility for liaising between services finding resolutions to complaints, enquiries, and members caseworks. Whilst also dealing with Freedom of Information, Subject Access Requests and Data Protection.

• The Registrars is responsible for the registration services as births, deaths, nationality, and marriages.

How we collect your personal information

When you contact the Local Authority, we will require a level of personal information depending on what you are contacting about in order that we can process your request and ensure the support is put in place. Any personal data requested is relevant and necessary for the Customer Contact Service to provide support.

Personal Information we collect and use

The information we collect varies but would typically include:

• Contact details - telephone number, and email address
• Personal details - date of birth, full name, and address
• Any other relevant details such as reason for contact and resolution sought.

You can also submit feedback anonymously without supplying any of the above information.

Your personal information will be used to:

• keep you updated with progress of any investigations we may make as a result of your feedback.
• we may also use your data for research purposes. When it is for research purposes it will be anonymised data only.  This means that no one will be able to identify you from the anonymised data.

How we use your personal information

Be assured that any personal information provided is only shared where relevant to address your complaints, enquiries, or comments and is not used for other purposes relating to the work undertaken by Customer Contact.

Information collected can be used in the following ways:

• Training Purposes
• Better understanding of our customers
• Resolving complaints
• Identifying service improvements, this will not include the personal information of our residents directly but rather the detail behind the contact.

Lawful basis for processing your personal information

Our main legal basis for processing your personal information under GDPR is “Public Task”. It is our duty to process complaints and ensure quality public services are delivered by analysing feedback from customers. We may also use “Consent” as a legal basis, for example, when a customer agrees to analytics cookies being used to track their journey across the website.

Protecting your personal information

The Council endeavours to ensure that the services we provide comply with all data protection legislation, for example, the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018). 

The Council has appropriate security and controls in place to prevent data loss, for example, hacking attempts, however, we cannot guarantee that the personal information you submit will not be intercepted..

Sharing your personal information

The Council will not share your information with any third parties for the purposes of direct marketing.

We have contracts in place with third parties who may provide certain elements of services for us, (data processors). This means that they cannot do anything with your personal information unless we have instructed them to do it.

We may share your personal data with:

• Services within the council who can respond to your feedback
• Third party suppliers who are commissioned by the council to deliver services that you have provided feedback about.
• Advocates, deputies, legal representatives
• Schools and Educations providers
• Police
• Health agencies
• Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman
• Housing Ombudsman
• Legal representatives
• Council services

In certain circumstances, the Council may share your information with third parties, for example, where we are legally required to do so, for the prevention/detection of crime/fraud, or where we are concerned about your, or someone else’s, well-being.

How long do we keep your personal information for

The Council will only keep your information for as long as is necessary, for the minimum amount of time, for the purpose it was collected, and in line with statutory and/or business requirements.

The Customer Contact Service works alongside the general data privacy notice which is published on our website at the following link https://www.lbbd.gov.uk/general-privacy-notice  within this published page is guidance on the retention of information according to the nature of contact, an example of retention would be complaints data which is stored for a period of 7 years and then deleted.

Cookies

To learn more about cookies, please visit https://www.lbbd.gov.uk/general-privacy-notice

Your Individual Rights

To learn more about your Individual Rights, or how to raise a concern, please go to our General Privacy Notice

Changes to this privacy notice

This privacy notice was last reviewed on 19/06/2023