Privacy Notice

Website Privacy Policy:

OX Place is a trading name of Oxford City Housing Ltd., Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates, Oxford OX1 1BX. Company No.: 10212716. Oxford City Housing Ltd. is a housing company of Oxford City Council, set up in 2016.

On 25 May 2018 Data Protection Law changed, giving more rights to you as an individual and more obligations on organisations holding your personal data.

One of the rights is the right to be informed, which means we have to give you even more information about the way in which we use, share and store your personal information.

This Privacy Notice provides you with this information, along with information about the increased rights you have in relation to the information we hold on you and the legal basis on which we are using it.

How we use your information:

We use data about you to provide you with services, communicate with you, to plan our services, and to personalise your experience.

Your information may be shared with other parts of government, other councils and our delivery partners, to deliver you services or if required by law.

We will not share your details with 3rd parties for marketing purposes unless you agree.

You have rights in respect of your data including the right to be supplied information on our processing of personal data, to see what data we are holding about you, to request correction or erasure of your data, to object to processing and to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

We reuse your data to improve your experience and ensure you are provided with the best possible service. We use your personal data in the following ways:

• To provide services to you. This is generally the primary purpose for most information we hold. This also involves charging for services and collection of taxation – for example, payment for car parking, collection of Council Tax. This commonly involves data sharing with our partner organisations
• To communicate with you. We will communicate to you regarding your requests, your services and as required by legal responsibilities. If you specifically permit it, we will communicate with you about other services and local events we think you may be interested in. We will not pass your data to third parties to advertise services unless this is specifically permitted by you. Oxford City Council will never sell data to 3^rd Party Marketing Companies.
• To plan our services. Your data is used to plan our current and future services. For example, if you make a request of us, then that will be used to decide when to deliver the service. Anonymised data – that is, data from which you are not personally identifiable, is used to plan future services. For example, the number of people living in an area may be used to plan where services are needed.
• To personalise your experience. Your data is used to show you services of relevance to you, to ensure we address you by your preferred name.
• To Prevent Crime and Fraud We also use data in other legal ways, governed by the law of the UK. Examples include for the prevention and detection of crime e.g. fraud.

Personal Data We Collect

We collect your personal data for a variety of purposes. Please see specific purposes for more details. You provide some of this data when you fill in a form (online or paper), when you speak to us on the phone or face to face. We get some of it from automatic recording e.g. cookies.

When we no longer require your personal data, it is deleted according to our retention policy. 

The data we collect can include the following:

Name and contact details: we collect your name, your address, your email address, your phone number and similar contact details. These are used to provide you with services and to contact you in relation to services. If you have given permission, we also use these for marketing purposes for services/events provided by us or by others in the local area. If you have given permission for third party marketing, we additionally may pass this data to third parties for carefully selected marketing relevant to your permissions.

Demographic data: this includes age and gender. We may collect more sensitive characteristics such as nationality, race, religion, sexuality and ethnicity in order to fulfil our obligations under the Equalities Act 2010. These sensitive characteristics are only used for the purposes of the Equalities Act or those defined and to which you consented at the time we collected them. Where practicable, these data are managed separately from other data. Where data is used for statistical purposes all data is anonymised.

Financial Data: we collect data about income, outgoings, savings and assets owned in order to provide services to you. These include matters such as benefits.

Health and Care Data: we collect data about your health, including medical conditions, disabilities and information from your healthcare providers where needed to provide services to you. We additionally receive health data about you from third parties such as the NHS and police under a series of multi-agency sharing agreements. Data about you is used to inform our services to you and is only shared with practitioners in those services.

Reasons why we share personal data

We share your personal data with a range of organisations to provide you with services, plan services and to ensure that crime is prevented or detected. These include:

• Third party organisations delivering services on our behalf
• Central government
• Health and social care
• Police

We share your data with your consent or as necessary to provide any service.

We share with third party organisations delivering services on our behalf. This sharing is covered by agreements to maintain your privacy to the same level as we require of ourselves, and data shared is strictly restricted to that necessary for delivering services.

We also share data with Central Government and its agencies, including police and health, as required by law, for the delivery of service, prevention and detection of crime, public health, safety and service planning. This sharing, where not required by law, is again covered by agreements about your privacy.

How to control your personal data and your rights

You have a right to require us to make changes to your data if it is wrong. 

You have the right to demand that we erase data that we hold on you. However, please note that we can only do this if it is not required for further processing; in general, we erase your data as soon as we no longer require it. 

You have the right to request that we give you a copy of your data. This is called a “Subject Access Request”. You may do this by emailing dataprotection@oxford.gov.uk.

If you have a privacy concern, complaint or question for Oxford City Council Corporate Governance Manager, please email or contact via post.

You have the right to complain about our processing to the Information Commissioner if you believe we are not processing your data in a proper manner.

For more details on your rights in processing data, visit the ICO website.

Oxford City Council is registered with the ICO as a data controller and processor. Our registration number is Z7925628.

Cookies and similar technologies

Where services are delivered via websites, small amounts of information are sometimes placed on your device eg your computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally. You can restrict or block cookies, but these may stop parts of the website from working.

We use cookies for a number of purposes:

• measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast
• analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with government services so we can make them better

If you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by our websites, or any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘Help’ function within your browser should tell you how.

Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of our website.

To view your cookie code, click on the cookie to open it. You will see a short list of text and numbers. The numbers are your identification card, which can only be seen by the server that gave you the cookie.

For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.

Other important privacy information

Below you will find additional privacy information you may wish to know. Oxford City Council is committed to maintaining the privacy of your personal information. 

Storage and processing of personal data

Data collected by Oxford City Council is generally processed within the UK and the EEA. These uses all comply with the requirements of the GDPR and UK government security policy.    Should Oxford City Council require data to be shared outside of the EEA you will be informed in advance and additional security will be sought for the protection of data.

Security of personal data

We use a variety of techniques to ensure the privacy of your personal data and protect it from unauthorised disclosure or access. These include physical security, encryption at rest and in transit, multi-factor authentication and intrusion detection systems.

Retention of personal data

Oxford City Council operates a data retention and disposal scheme based on legal and operational requirements. Data is disposed of securely when it is no longer required for processing purposes. 

Changes to the privacy statement

We will update this privacy statement whenever a change in our use or a change in law occurs, and in response to your feedback. We encourage you to periodically review this statement and provide us with feedback on areas you believe we could improve.

How to contact us

If you have a privacy concern, complaint or question for Oxford City Council Corporate Governance Manager, please email dataprotection@oxford.gov.uk.

You can also contact the Council’s Corporate Governance Manager by post at:

Corporate Governance Manager 
Oxford City Council
Oxford Town Hall,
St Aldates,
Oxford
OX1 1BX