Housing Applicant Privacy Notice
River Clyde Homes is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information.
This privacy notice describes how we collect and use personal information in relation to your application for social housing. It also details your rights in relation to your personal information.
River Clyde Homes is a data controller of the information you provide and is registered with the Information Commissioner.
Where your personal information comes from
The information we hold about you, or your household, comes from:
- You – the information you provide in the housing application form or when you notify us of a change of circumstances;
- Family member or former partner, where this is needed to verify information included in the application;
- Your previous landlord – we request references in relation to previous tenancies which will include information about rechargeable repairs, outstanding debt and complaints of anti-social behaviour;
- The Health and Social Care Partnership’s Homelessness Service – where a homelessness referral is made on your behalf; and
- Social Work or other supporting agencies – where we require to verify information provided on your application form.
How we use information about you
We will use information about you to assess your housing need in order that we can allocate our homes effectively and in manner that is compatible with legislation applicable to social landlords.
We will use your personal information to:
- process your application for housing, assess your housing requirements and enable you to bid for available properties; and
- communicate with you regarding your application.
- We do this because it is necessary in order to enter into a contract with you (the tenancy agreement).
- We also process your personal information in pursuit of our legitimate interests to:
- investigate and respond to any complaints or queries you may have;
- improving and developing the services we offer – we may on occasion ask your opinion of the service we provide and analyse any responses provided or information provided in the housing applications for this purpose;
- to monitor and review equality of opportunity; and
- facilitate any necessary legal proceedings.
In certain circumstances we may require to process or disclose your personal details in order to fulfil our legal or regulatory requirements.
If you do not provide us with all of the information that we require this may affect our ability to assess and process your Housing Application and ultimately affect our ability to enter into a tenancy agreement with you.
Special Categories of Personal Information
We also process some special categories of personal information such as:
- Health related information for the purposes of assessing housing need;
- Relevant criminal conviction information including information related to sexual offences. We process this in order to make appropriate housing arrangements and to comply with our legal obligations as a social landlord; and
- Health, racial and ethnic origin data for the purposes of equalities monitoring – to identify and keep under review the existence or absence of equality of opportunity or treatment between groups of people and to promote or maintain equality.
Children’s information
We do not usually process children’s information as part of the housing application process, as all applicants are adults. However, we record children’s basic information if they are to be resident in one of our properties, including their name and date of birth. This is required for checking the property is not overcrowded and to assess other tenancy management issues where all householders and ages are required to be known.
We may at a later stage receive children’s information if we are involved in the housing and tenancy aspects of a welfare case as part of a multi-agency working solution.
Where we store your data
We store your information in the HomeConnection system – this is basically a large database, an electronic web-based information storage system. Information we receive from third parties is uploaded to the HomeConnections system is uploaded and stored against your individual application. It’s also possible that some information may be held in the email system.
Automated Decision Making
We do not take any decisions based solely on automated processing and we do not envisage this changing.
Who might we share your information with?
We may disclose your personal information to third parties for the purposes set out in this notice or purposes approved by you, including the following:
- Your information may be disclosed to software/ IT providers maintaining our systems.
- Where you have given us authority to, we will share information with someone acting on your behalf.
- Third parties where necessary to verify information you have included for consideration in your housing application;
- If we are conducting a survey of our products and/ or service, your information may be disclosed to third parties assisting in the compilation and analysis of the survey results;
We may grant access to auditors or the Scottish Housing Regulator as required and may also share personal information with our professional and legal advisors for the purposes of taking advice.
In the event that we do share personal information with external third parties, we will only share such personal information strictly required for the specific purposes and take reasonable steps to ensure that recipients shall only process the disclosed personal information in accordance with those purposes.
How we manage your personal information
We process your information in accordance with data protection principles.
We will keep your data for as long as we have an active application for housing. We will contact you regularly, most likely annually, to ensure that you are still looking for a property. If we cannot contact you, or you indicate that you no longer want to be registered, we will withdraw your housing application and anonymise your data for reporting purposes.
We are committed to keeping your personal details up to date and ask that you inform us about any changes needed to ensure your details are accurate.
We may ask you security questions to confirm your identity when you call us. This is to help us to protect the confidentiality of your personal information.
Your rights and how to contact us
The law gives you the following rights in relation to your personal information – the right to:
- be informed about what we do with your personal information (this notice explains what we do with your personal information);
- get a copy of the information we hold about you (this is known as a subject access request);
- ask us to correct information that is incorrect – please use the Change of Circumstances form to do this or alternatively contact us using the details below;
- stop us doing certain things with your information, for example when you think the information is incorrect;
- object to us using it for marketing;
- get us to delete your information in certain circumstances;
- get an electronic copy of your information so that you can send it to another company;
- object to the personal data we hold on you;
- be informed of and object to any important decisions being taken about you automatically.
If you have any questions about this privacy notice or you would like to exercise any of the above rights, please contact us on [email protected], 0800 013 2196 or write to us at
Data Protection,
River Clyde Homes,
Roxburgh House,
102-112 Roxburgh Street,
Greenock,
PA15 4JT
We aim to resolve all queries or concerns internally but you do have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at any time or to claim compensation, through the courts, if we misuse your information.
The Information Commissioner’s Office – Scotland
45 Melville Street, Edinburgh, EH3 7HL
Telephone: 0131 244 9001
Email: [email protected]
Changes to this Privacy Notice
We keep this notice under regular review and will place any updates on our website; you will be notified of any major changes to this notice. The latest full version is always available from our website at https://www.riverclydehomes.org.uk/.
