Stevenage Citizens Advice Privacy Policy
At Stevenage Citizens Advice, we collect and use your personal information to help solve your problems, improve our services and tackle wider issues in society that affect people's lives.
This privacy policy explains how we use your information and what your rights are. We handle and store your personal information in line with data protection law and our confidentiality policy. The following pages tell you more about how we use your information in more detail.
Citizens Advice is a membership organisation made up of the national Citizens Advice charity and many local offices across England and Wales, including Stevenage Citizens Advice. Stevenage Citizens Advice is an independent charity and a member of the national Citizens Advice charity.
All members of the Citizens Advice network are responsible for keeping your personal information safe and making sure data protection law is followed.
Members of the network also run some jointly designed services and use some of the same systems to process your personal data. In these instances, we are joint data controllers for these activities.
All offices in the Citizens Advice network use some joint systems to carry out our activities. These include joint case management systems, telephony platforms and more.
Staff from a different local Citizens Advice can only access your personal information in a joint system if they have a good reason. For example, when:
We have rules and controls in place to stop people accessing or using your information when they shouldn’t.
Tell an adviser if you’re worried about your details being on a national system. We’ll work with you to take extra steps to protect your information - for example by recording your problem without using your name.
National Citizens Advice has a privacy notice available on their website that covers general advice and nationally managed systems, including our case management systems. This policy covers the processing we carry out in our office.
This section covers how we use your data to provide you with advice.
For general advice and nationally funded advice programmes please see the national Citizens Advice privacy notice.
The main reason we ask for your information is to help solve your problem.
We only access your information for other reasons if we really need to - for example:
At Citizens Advice Stevenage we collect and use your personal information to help solve your problems, improve our services and tackle wider issues in society that affect people’s lives.
At Citizens Advice we have a confidentiality policy which states that anything you tell us as part of advice will not be shared outside of the Citizens Advice network unless you provide your permission for us to do so.
There are some exceptions to this such as needing to share:
Sharing information to solve your problem
If you ask us to act on your behalf, we might need to share some of your information with other organisations - we'll always tell you when we do this. For example, if we contact your creditors about your debts, we might need to share your name, address and financial details with them.
If we refer you to another organisation for more advice, we might share information about your problem with them so they can help you more quickly.
We may share your information with the following:
This section covers how we use your data to carry out our research, feedback and statistical work.
National Citizens Advice covers their use of data for this purpose in their privacy notice.
This section covers how we use your data to carry out our fundraising activities.
National Citizens Advice covers their use of data for fundraising in their privacy notice.
National Citizens Advice is responsible for managing any data in joint client case records. For more information please see their privacy notice.
Whether you get advice face to face, over the phone or by email, our adviser will log all your information, correspondence, and notes about your problem into our secure case management systems. Some of your information might also be kept within our secure email and IT systems.
We keep your information for 6 years. If your case has been subject to a serious complaint, insurance claim or other dispute we keep the data for 16 years.
If you use the consumer service, we keep your information for 6 years and then anonymise it. This means that you can no longer be identified from it.
You have rights in relation to your personal data that we hold. Your rights include being able to request:
These rights are not absolute and may not apply in every circumstance. For more information about your rights you can visit the ICO website.
To make a data protection rights request you can do so by emailing admin@castevenage.org.uk
If you are concerned about how we have handled your personal information, please contact us at admin@castevenage.org.uk.
You can also contact the national charity if you are unhappy with how we have used your personal data or wish to raise a concern about how a local office has handled your personal data. To do so you can email us at DPO@citizensadvice.org.uk
You can also raise your concern with the Information Commissioner's Office which regulates data protection law in the UK. if you are unhappy with how we have used your personal information. They will normally expect you to have made a complaint to us directly in the first instance.