Data protection

Herefordshire Council ensures that information held about you is processed in accordance with the rights provided in the Data Protection Act 2018. This safeguards your data and prohibits any non-compliant or unauthorised processing.

We provide a wide range of services and to administer these services efficiently it may be necessary for us to process personal information. This information can be held in manual files or on computer. We only hold the minimum necessary personal data and we only keep it for as long we need it for the purposes it was obtained for. We inform you in our privacy notices what data we need to process and the reason for doing so.

Data protection principles

Anyone processing personal data must comply with six enforceable principles. Briefly, they say that the data must be:

  • Processed fairly, lawfully and in a transparent manner
  • Collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed for other purposes incompatible with the original purpose
  • Adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes
  • Accurate and kept up to date
  • Kept in a form that permits identification for no longer than is necessary
  • Processed in a way that ensures appropriate security of the personal data

Individuals have a number of rights under data protection law, including the right to request their information, the right to be informed, the right to restrict processing and the right to correct inaccurate data. You also have a right to make a complaint about our handling of your personal data to the Information Commissioner’s Office

Download and view information on your rights under the new Data Protection legislation

Data privacy impact assessments

A data privacy impact assessment is used to ensure that data protection risks are properly identified and addressed wherever possible, and that decision-makers have been fully informed of the risks and the options available for mitigating them. Find out more about data privacy impact assessments.