The Democratic Services Team provides a range of support services to Councillors and Officers of the Council. These include the production of documents for Council, Cabinet, Committees and other meetings together with providing procedural advice at meetings to ensure compliance with the Council's Constitution. We also provide a comprehensive and independent clerking service for school appeals, including the appointment of independent school appeal panel members.
Information is collected about Members who serve on various bodies and for the processing of individual matters dealt with by the team. This includes:
- Names
- Addresses
- Contact details (e-mail addresses & telephone numbers)
- Evidence to support individual applications/appeals (such as information about a child or family’s circumstances in relation to a school appeal)
We collect information in the following ways:
- Direct Communication (either by telephone, in person, email or in writing)
- Standard forms
- Website (e-petitions)
We collect and use personal information where it is necessary for the performance of our task in the public interest or for our official/statutory functions. This includes functions relating to the servicing of meetings under the Local Government Acts of 1972 and 2000 and the Local Government and Housing Act 1989.
In relation to school appeals and exclusion reviews we are required to comply with statutory requirements that include disclosure of your grounds for appeal (School Standards and Framework Act 1998, Education Acts 1996, 2002 and 2011, associated Regulations and guidance). For employment appeals we have an obligation to comply with employment law (eg: Employment Rights Act 1996 and Equality Act 2010).
We collect and process information about you for the following purposes:
- To ensure compliance with statutory duties
- To respond to requests for advice and information
- To hold and determine appeals
- To process applications received
- To process complaints
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow policies and procedures to control and safeguard access to and use of your personal information.
We have document retention procedures to ensure that information is kept only to comply with legal obligations or if it is required for business purposes to deal with appeals. Information is stored in secure systems such as the Committee Management Information System or the School Appeals Database maintained by the Council.
When information is sent to Councillors or Panel Members we advise that this information must be treated as private and confidential. It is their responsibility to ensure that information containing private and personal data is kept safe and secure at all times. Following meetings confidential papers are handed to the Democratic Services Officer for secure disposal. If Members choose to retain documents they should ensure that the information is securely stored and destroyed within six months.
Our retention policy shows how long we keep information for different services. This includes:
- Correspondence is generally retained for 2 years (or until no longer required for legal or business purposes).
- Council, Cabinet and Committee agendas and reports are retained for a minimum of 6 years after the meeting in line with the Council’s Constitution and legal requirements.
- Council, Cabinet and Committee minutes are retained indefinitely in archives.
School appeal notes, agenda and related correspondence is retained for 3 years in line with statutory guidance.
- Exclusion Review notes, agenda and related correspondence is retained for 5 years in line with statutory guidance.
- Appeals Committee notes, correspondence and other relevant papers are retained for 3 years.
We may share your personal information, as appropriate, with organisations including:
- Councillors/ Panel Members/ Trustees/ Schools
- Officers of the Council who have an involvement in the business concerned
Third parties if they have an involvement in a particular appeal/case (eg: people identified as witnesses)
- Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman
- Astech (as 3rd party provider of Committee Management Information System)
The majority of council, cabinet and committee meetings are held in public session. Publicly available agendas and reports are published on the Council’s website five clear working days before the meeting.
Minutes and details of decisions are also published on the Council’s website once available.
Any meetings that are held in public session may be recorded and/or broadcast on the internet. Recordings of public proceedings may be made available on the Internet for future viewing. If you have asked a question, or participated in a discussion, some information about you will be included in these records.
Please note that websites can be seen throughout the world, and not just in the United Kingdom where UK law applies.
The Openness of Local Government Regulations 2014, which apply to England, give rights to members of the press and public to use modern technology and communication methods such as filming, audio-recording, blogging and social media to report the public proceedings of any meetings of the council, cabinet or committees. The use of any recording or filming devices must not disrupt the meeting.
If you create an e-petition on the Council’s website, you will be required to provide personal information so that we can contact you about your petition. The information will only be used for this purpose, although we may need to pass your details to the relevant service to enable them to respond to the issues you raise.
If you sign an e-petition on the Council’s website, you will be required to provide some personal information to enable us to verify that the signatory is genuine. E-petitions and the Council’s responses are published on the Council’s website.
The information collected for school admission appeals will be used to arrange an appeal hearing and will be shared with the Independent Appeal Panel, the Panel Clerk to the Appeal Panel, the School Admissions Team and the school you are appealing for.
The information collected for a school exclusion review will be used to arrange the exclusion review and will be shared with the Independent Exclusion Review Panel; Panel Clerk; the local authority, any SEN expert requested to attend the review and the excluding school.
Systems used by third party organisations are scrutinised and checked so their processing and handling of data meets strict UK General Data Protection Regulation standards, including having robust, secure safety measures that guard against data loss or mis-handling.
We will process information in a legitimate and lawful basis to facilitate and provide services to members of the public. In doing so we may use Adobe Acrobat Sign, an electronic signature solution, to capture e-signatures to approve Decision Memorandums and or Decision Sheets. This system is used to meet compliance and governance frameworks and in particular accountability where electronically signed documents are required.
This requires information to be collected and stored with our third party cloud-hosted supplier in a safe and secure manner.
As with cloud service providers data retention rules are adhered to and therefore these decision agreements are removed from the cloud hosting environment as per data retention rules.
Please view the Adobe Sign Privacy Policy
We do not process personal information outside the European Economic Community (EEC).
At no time will your information be passed to organisations external to the Council or its partners for marketing or sales purposes or for any commercial use without your prior express consent.
