Housing benefits overpayments privacy notice

Why do we collect data?

We need your information to process your HBO account and payments. This includes ensuring you are being invoiced the right amount and that the most appropriate form of recovery is used.

The information we collect is in order to fulfil our statutory duties under The Housing Benefit Regulations 2006 and the Social Security (Overpayments and Recovery) Regulations 2013.

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 HBO account and payments. We require bank details to be provided if your HBO is collected by direct debit and, on some occasions, bank statements to demonstrate your income and expenditure, when negotiating payment arrangements.

In limited circumstances, we may also take HBO directly from salaries for local government staff or ask employers to make payments under a direct earnings attachment and will require employer details to process this.

To negotiate rates of payment or assess vulnerability, you may also be required to provide sensitive information including income, health or disability. We may require proof of this sensitive information.

Where we share your data

There are legal restrictions on how HBO 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 intend to obtain a County Court Judgement we will share relevant information with the county court or high court
• in the event that there are arrears and other methods of recovery have proved fruitless, 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 HBO as part of our citizen index, a system that acts as a central record for residents receiving council services

There are some laws that specifically state that HBO 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 main privacy notice for more information on retention schedules.

Your rights

Please see our main privacy notice for more details on your right:

• to be informed
• to access your personal data
• to rectify your personal data if it is incorrect
• to 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.