Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council is committed to protecting your privacy when you use our services.
This Privacy Notice explains how teams carrying out consultations use information about you and how we protect your privacy.
Consultations are a valuable way of gathering the thoughts and opinions of people about a variety of subjects. They provide an opportunity for people to have their say and help the council reach decisions about important matters.
Information you provide to us will be processed in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) and subsequent legislation. Please see the Council’s Corporate Privacy Notice
The service area carrying out the consultation will also have its own service specific privacy notice which will detail how the service processes and securely stores data.
The information collected will vary. Some consultations do not need to collect any personal information and allow anonymous responses to be returned. Sometimes it is important to collect some personal details and demographic information of respondents. For this reason a variety of information may be collected including:
• personal details such as name, age and address • family details • lifestyle and social circumstances • employment and education details • housing needs • we may also process what is referred to as “special categories of information” that may include data revealing racial or ethnic origin and health
The information will be used by the service who carried out the consultation to inform strategy, projects and/or communications.
Responses may be shared with the senior officers and elected members. Most of the time this will be anonymous or we will not link your name and address and other personal information with your answers (anonymised).
Sometimes we may need to link your personal information with your answers, for example if we are required to by law and in other specific situations. BUT we will only do this if we have clearly explained on the specific consultation. On some specific types of consultation this may mean your name and responses can be seen by people from other organisations. Again if this is the case we will state this on the consultation in question.
The law gives you a number of rights to control how we use your personal information. For more details on your rights please visit Dudley Council’s Corporate Privacy Notice.
Further information
Please contact the Corporate Information Governance Team at information.governance@dudley.gov.uk to exercise any of your rights, or if you have a complaint about how your information has been used.
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.
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
