Privacy notice - Stronger Families - Family Case Work

We are the Middlesbrough Council Stronger Families Service. We provide support to Middlesbrough’s children, young people and families through a family case work approach. Our purpose is to work together with you so that you can make the most out of your family life, to be healthier, to achieve, be safe, strengthen and enjoy your lives together.

We collect personal information about you and your family, relatives, and friends. This might include things like names, addresses and other contact details, dates of birth and information about your family life, finances, educational needs and achievement, personal strengths, worries, experiences, and aspirations.

Where it is relevant, we also ask for more sensitive information about your health, racial or ethnic origin which might include preferred languages, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life or sexual orientation, and criminal offences or convictions.

Normally, we will ask you to provide this information when we work with you. But sometimes we ask for it from other services in the Council or from other organisations who provide it to us in referrals, reports, or in meetings.

Because the Council either has to or can decide whether it should provide you with services, data protection allows us to rely on ‘legal obligations’ and ‘public tasks’ to use your information. Where we use more sensitive information, the law allows us to do so for reasons of ‘substantial public interest’ and the fact that we are providing you ‘social care’. Some of those laws include the Children’s Act 1989, Children’s Act 2004, and Childcare Act 2006 and Government guidance that we are required to follow called ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children 2018’.

If you are experiencing difficult circumstances, we will use your information and work with other organisations to help you achieve your goals. There are some times when the law says that we have to use your information to make sure that you and your family are safe, especially if it is about a child or a vulnerable person.

We use the ‘Family Work Intervention’ so that only the workers who need to be are involved with your family. We share information with other services and organisations so that you don’t have to attend more meetings than is necessary and so that you receive the right number of visits from workers. This also helps us to make sure that you have one, clear plan to help you achieve your goals.

We share information where we need to with other Council Children’s Services like social work, education, youth offending and other services like public health and adult social care. We also share information with other organisations like schools and academies, health services, police, and voluntary organisations that can help you. We only share information where necessary to help provide the services you have asked for or where we are required by law. Again, data protection allows us to rely on our ‘legal obligations’, ‘public tasks’, ‘provision of social care’, and ‘substantial public interest’ when we share your information.

We store all personal data in electronic computer systems that are protected by security methods like passwords, encryption, and virus scanning. We try not to keep information on paper, but where we do, this is always the minimum amount of data and it is always safely transferred into a computer.

We keep personal data for at least 6 years after we stop providing you any services. Sometimes the law requires us to keep it for a lot longer if we are concerned about a child or a vulnerable person. But we always delete or destroy it securely after we no longer need it.

We don’t transfer your information outside of the ‘European Economic Area’ or to a country where we know it won’t be kept safe.

We won’t use your information to send you marketing. We will only give you information about services that you have asked for or that we are required to tell you about by law.

The data protection law gives you rights that we have to make you aware of. Some of these rights are not always available because of the reasons we use your information. Where you ask about your rights we will always tell you if they are available and if we the law allows us to refuse these rights we will always tell you. The following rights are available with Family Casework:

• Right of access - you can always ask for copies of your personal data
• Right to rectification - you can always ask us to correct information about you that you think is incorrect or incomplete
• Right to object - you can object to us using your data unless the law requires us to use it

If you have a concerns about the way we are collecting or using your personal data, you should raise your concern with us in the first instance or directly to the Information Commissioner's Office. Visit the website of the Information Commissioner's Office.

If you would like to discuss anything in this privacy notice or your information rights, please contact:

The Data Protection Officer
Middlesbrough Council
PO Box 500, Middlesbrough, TS1 9FT
Phone: 01642 245432
Email: dataprotection@middlesbrough.gov.uk