Council Tax privacy notice

This privacy notice sits beneath the council’s top level privacy notice and provides information about how personal data is used by Hackney’s Council Tax services:

• Council Tax
• Council Tax discounts and exemptions

Please see the main privacy notice for details on your rights and who to contact about use of personal data.

Why do we collect data?

We need your information to process your Council Tax account and payments, and to apply any discounts and exemptions correctly.

The information we collect is to fulfil our statutory duties under the Local Government finance Act 1992.

Any ‘special category’ data (such as health and disability) will be processed as part of our obligation to meet social protection laws.

What data do we collect?

Your personal contact details will be required to process your Council Tax account and payments.

We require bank details be provided if your Council Tax is collected by Direct Debit.

In limited circumstances, we may also take Council Tax directly from salaries for local government staff or ask employers to make payments under an attachment, and will require employer details in order to process this.

To obtain discounts and exemptions, you may also be required to provide sensitive information including income, health or disability information.

See who’s eligible for discounts or exemptions. We will require proof in support of any application for a discount.

Where we share your data

There are legal restrictions on how Council Tax information is shared and processed, and we as a council adhere to these. Places we may share your data include:

• in the event that there are arrears for which we have issued a summons we will share relevant information with the magistrates court
• in the event that there are arrears for which we have obtained a liability order, we may engage a debt recovery firm to retrieve these and share relevant information with them for this purpose
• we may use an external printing firm to produce paper statements and any mass-mailed correspondence letters
• we use basic contact information on Council Tax as part of our citizen index, a system that acts as a central record for residents receiving council services
• with the Office of National Statistics under the Statistics and Registration Services Act 2007

There are some laws that specifically state that Council Tax data may be used within the council for another purpose to fulfil another one of the tasks under our official authority.

If this is the case, we will include this on the relevant privacy notice for the service that is using it.

How long we keep your data for

Please see our privacy statement for more information on retention schedules.

Your rights

Please see our privacy statement for more details on your right to:

• be informed
• access your personal data
• rectify your personal data if it is incorrect
• restrict our processing of your personal data

If you do find that the information we hold on you is incorrect, you should inform us as soon as possible to update our records.