Privacy Policy

Privacy Notice

Long Melford Parish Council complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect on 25 May 2018. The Council is committed to keeping any personal information provided to it safe, secure accurate and up to date. It will not keep your information for longer than necessary.

This privacy notice explains how we use your personal information and the ways in which we protect your privacy, and applies to all personal data collected for or on behalf of Long Melford Parish Council. This includes information collected by letter, email, telephone, face-to-face or online. You may also receive a privacy notice which is specific to the service you are receiving.

By using our site you agree to accept this privacy notice. This notice may be reviewed from time to time, so please check back here each time you submit personal data to us.

How we use your personal information
We collect and use your personal information so we can provide you with statutory and other services. We use your information for the purpose for which you provided the information, including the delivery of services for you. We also use this information to monitor our performance in responding to your request.

We use your information in the following ways:

  • to tell you about services and provide services appropriate to you, for example highlighting additional help or services available to you.
  • for insight purposes to allow us to analyse patterns and trends of service usage
  • for service and financial planning, to help us create policy and inform decision making, e.g. identifying where new facilities/infrastructure are most needed
  • to process financial transactions including payments involving the Parish Council or where the Council is acting on behalf of other government bodies, eg Babergh District Council
  • to help us to verify your identity if you ask us for services
  • to ensure that the council meets its duties, including those imposed by the Equality and Health and Safety Acts
  • where necessary for law enforcement functions, eg licensing, planning enforcement, trading standards and food safety where the Parish Council is legally obliged to carry out such processing.
  • to help investigate any concerns or complaints you have may have about the services you receive
  • where otherwise allowed under law. For further information on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into effect on 25 May 2018, please refer to the Information Commissioner’s website

Services such as education and social care, protection of vulnerable children and adults, and the support of public health and wellbeing may involve collecting, using and sharing sensitive personal data as defined by law. We do not disclose or share sensitive or confidential information without your explicit consent except in a small number of situations where disclosure is allowed by law, or where we have good reason to believe that failing to do so would put you or someone else at risk.

The Parish Council is obliged to protect public funds. We may use personal information and data-matching techniques to help us to detect and prevent fraud and ensure public money is spent in the most appropriate and cost-effective way. In order to achieve this, we may share information with other organisations which audit or administer public funds. This includes the Audit Commission, other local authorities, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Police.

The Parish Council may record some telephone conversations. The reasons for this include to help with staff training, to maintain records of conversations, to help with the detection, investigation and prevention of crime. We will tell you if your call is being recorded.

We may use personal information to identify people who will need extra support during emergencies or major incidents e.g. emergency evacuation.

We are keen to ensure that we are providing the services that are needed and may contact you to make you aware of services or support which could be of interest to you. We may invite you to sign up for other services at the same time (for example, a regular mailing list). You can choose not to accept this invitation.

We may also ask for feedback on how we are performing, or ask for your views on services which you have been using.

You may not want us to collect or share your personal information, or you may set conditions on how we can use it. In these cases we may not be able to provide with the service you need, or may only be able to provide it in a limited way. There are occasions when we have a statutory obligation to collect or use personal information. In those cases we will not be able to agree to your request.

We may use ethnic, gender, sexual orientation and age information (ie, equalities data) to compile statistics in order to comply with equality legislation and assist in planning and service provision. Such data does not identify individuals or affect your entitlement to services.

Third parties
The information we collect may be shared between Parish Council services and with other organisations, such as government bodies, the Police, health and social care organisations providing you with services and educational establishments.

We will only share your personal information when we are permitted to or are required to by law or we have your consent to do so as required by law.

The Parish Council does not pass personal data to other organisations for marketing purposes without your consent. Your personal information may be processed by an external service provider acting on our behalf to provide services.

Email
Emails that we send to you or you send to us may be kept as a record of contact. We may also store your email address for future use. If we need to email sensitive or confidential information to you, we will check that we are using the correct email address and may use additional security measures. If you need to send us sensitive information, we recommend using encrypted email or the postal service.

Your rights
You can ask us to stop processing your personal data in relation to any Parish Council service. This may delay or prevent us delivering a service to you. We will try to meet your request but we may be required to hold or process information to meet our legal duties.

You are entitled to request access to and a copy of any information we hold about you.

If you find that the information that the Parish Council holds about you is no longer accurate, you have the right to ask to have this corrected. We may not always be able to change or remove the information. However, we will correct factual inaccuracies and may include your comments in the records.

Queries and complaints
If you would like further information or have a complaint about any of the details in this notice, please contact us by email or post:

Write to: The Parish Clerk, The Council Offices, Cordell Road, Long Melford, Suffolk CO10 9EH
Email: clerk@longmelford-pc.gov.uk
Phone: 01787 378084

External links
This website contains external links to third party sites. Our privacy notice applies only to information collected by or on behalf of the Parish Council. If you go to another website, you should read their privacy notice before you give them any personal details.

Cookies
When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally. These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task

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

Our use of cookies
Google Analytics sets cookies to help us accurately estimate the number of visitors to the website and volumes of usage. This to ensure that the service is available when you want it and fast.

uses cookies for collecting non-personal user information from the site, we may use this data to enable the remarketing of our services on external websites.

Cookies are pieces of data created when you visit a site and contain a unique, anonymous number. They are stored in the cookie directory of your hard drive and do not expire at the end of your session. Cookies do not contain any personal information about you and cannot be used to identify an individual user. If you choose not to accept the cookie, this will not affect your access to the majority of facilities available on our website.

Although your browser may be set up to allow the creation of cookies, you can specify that you be prompted before a site puts a cookie on your hard disk, so that you can decide whether to allow or disallow the cookie. Alternatively, you can set your computer not to accept any cookie.

This site uses Google Analytics code to gather statistical information. For more information on how Google Analytics processes this information, visit the Google Analytics website.