Dudley Council Community Forum Grants – Privacy Notice

Personal information is any information that relates to a living individual, which can identify that individual.
If you contact us or apply for a grant, we will collect personal information about you and other people connected to your organisation. We may do this through conversations, at events or during visits to your organisation, or if you call our team to discuss funding applications. If your organisation applies for funding, we will also collect personal information on application forms.

Personal information we collect includes your name, position in the organisation, address, telephone number and email address.
We also collect:

• Copies of official documents relating to your organisation – a recent bank statement and copy of the latest audited accounts for the organisation applying for the grant
• Correspondence (emails, letters and social media posts)
• Photographs, quotes and case studies/ stories

We will only collect information that is relevant and required.

We will use your personal information to:

• Communicate with you about your community forum grant idea/ application. This may be in a range of formats e.g. email, telephone, text message or letter.
• Manage and monitor the grant and check the money is being used appropriately where a grant is awarded. If you don’t provide this personal information, we may not be able to process your application or award a grant to your organisation.
• Undertake checks for the purposes of preventing fraud and money laundering and to verify your identity.
• Evaluate and research the impact of our grants, and to let you know about our grants and other activities. The results of our evaluations and research may be published but we won’t publish your personal information without your agreement.
• Communicate with you on social media, if applicable, in line with the terms and conditions of those social media sites.
• Share photographs, quotes and case studies/ stories, to promote community forum grants through social media, websites, email newsletters and electronic/printed materials, with your consent. We will not publish details or full names (i.e. first name and surname) of you next to an image, quote or case study/ story without your consent.

The information collected is processed for the purposes of a “Public Task” where a power exists in legislation that permits the council to award the grant. The Council operates in accordance with many statutes or Acts of parliament, statutory instruments and Secretary of State directions. It is possible that grants can be awarded as a consequence of any number of these powers.  Further information can be identified in the Council’s main Privacy Notice.

Dudley Council staff who are directly involved in managing the community forum grants programme.

We will not share your personal information outside of Dudley Council without obtaining your consent to do so. Within Dudley Council, members of staff and elected members will only have access to personal information as required, in order to consider applications, administer, and monitor the funds. Appropriate safety measures are in place to ensure your personal information remains secure and is only used for the intended purposes.

Information may be shared with other council departments or third parties where legal to do so – for full details see the council’s main Privacy Notice.

The Council and fraud prevention agencies may also enable law enforcement agencies and other funders to access and use your personal data to detect, investigate and prevent crime.
Fraud prevention agencies can hold your personal data for different periods of time. If you are considered to pose a fraud or money laundering risk, your personal data can be held for up to six years.
If we, or a fraud prevention agency, determine that you pose a fraud or money laundering risk, we may refuse to award a grant and we may withdraw existing grants.
A record of any fraud or money laundering risk will be retained by us and the fraud prevention agencies, and may result in others refusing to provide you with services, financing or employment.

We will keep your personal information up to date and store it securely. We will put appropriate technical measures in place to protect it from loss, misuse, unauthorised access and disclosure, and not collect or retain excessive amounts of personal information.

• Electronic information is stored securely on databases, systems or onsite servers located in our secure data centres.
• Paper information is in locked storage.

Access to your information is restricted to staff directly involved in managing the community forum grants programme.

We keep your personal information for no longer than is necessary for the purposes described in this notice or otherwise allowed by law. If your funding application is not successful, the application form and supporting documents you have provided will be stored electronically for 3 years before being confidentially destroyed. If your funding application is successful the application form and supporting documents you have provided will be stored electronically for 6 years.

If you provide us with personal information of people who benefit from your project’s work we will treat this in the same way. You must tell the individuals and if they have any questions about this, you must refer them to this notice.

Data you share with us on social media is stored on those social media sites. You are advised to check the privacy notices or terms and conditions of your social media sites for more information. Dudley Council has no authority or control of any information retained on social media sites.

Any photographs, quotes, and case studies/ stories which you have consented for us to use, will be stored on our internal servers until the matter about which we are communicating with you concludes, expires or ceases. You can request that your photograph, quote or case study/ story is deleted at any point before this time.

Photographs, quotes or case studies/ stories used on social media, other digital platforms and in printed materials are deemed ‘published’ and in the public domain. Where reasonable and practical we will endeavour to delete such published personal information on request, however we cannot be responsible for any copies of the material created by subsequent sharing by a third party.

Your personal information is protected by legal rights. These include the right in certain circumstances to: 

• request a copy of your personal information held in relation to community forum grants; 
• ask for your personal information to be erased, for example, if we no longer need it for the purpose we collected it; 
• request that we suspend the processing of your personal information, for example if you want us to establish whether it is accurate or the reason for processing it; 
• object to the processing of your personal information where we are processing it in the exercise of our official authority.

You have the right to request us to stop processing your personal information in relation to the community forum grants by emailing community.forums@dudley.gov.uk or calling 01384 814713.

For more information, or to exercise your data protection rights please contact the Council’s Corporate Information Governance Team at information.governance@dudley.gov.uk. You can contact our Data Protection Officer via the same email address or write to: Data Protection Officer, The Council House, Priory Road, Dudley, DY1 1HF.

For more details on your rights please visit Dudley Council’s main Privacy Notice.

The UK GDPR also gives you the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioners Office who are the supervisory authority responsible for regulating and monitoring the legislative obligations within the UK. They can be contacted via ICO Contact Us.