Housing Services (Application for a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) Licence) privacy notice

We ask that you read this privacy notice carefully as it contains important information on who we are, how and why we collect, store, use and share personal information, your rights in relation to your personal information and on how to contact us and supervisory authorities in the event that you have a complaint.

Who we are

Housing Services collects, uses and is responsible for certain personal information about you. When we do so we are regulated under the General Data Protection Regulation which applies across the European Union (including in the United Kingdom) and we are responsible as ‘controller’ of that personal information for the purposes of those laws.

The personal information we collect

Information collected by us

In the course of processing your application for an HMO licence it is necessary that we collect the following personal information from you:

• your name
• address
• telephone number
• email address
• the address of all rented HMO properties that you own
• your membership of any professional landlord bodies and details of any relevant unspent criminal convictions you may have

Information collected from other sources

We may receive information from other government agencies, other departments within Dorset Council and those parties who we may share your personal information with, as listed below.

How we use your personal information

We will store and process your personal information in order to determine your application for an HMO licence, in fulfilment of our statutory and other responsibilities and to deliver the highest quality service to you.

Who we share your personal information with

In order to determine your application for an HMO licence we may routinely share certain personal information with third party partners including:

• other housing providers
• our legal advisors
• organisations responsible for the delivery of essential services such as gas, electric, sewage and water
• local and national government agencies
• Lendology CIC (formerly Wessex CIC) and Healthy Homes Dorset.

We will only share personal information where it is essential to the delivery of the above services.

This data sharing enables us to ensure the best service is delivered. We do not anticipate that our data-transferring arrangements will involve a transfer outside of the European Economic Area (EEA).

On occasions we may be required to share personal information with law enforcement or other authorities if required by applicable law. Where this occurs we will attempt to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place.

As a mandatory participant of the National Fraud Initiative (NFI), we sometimes share personal data with the NFI.  The purpose of this data sharing is to detect and prevent fraud.  The NFI may share the personal data we provide with other bodies or organisations including: HMRC, the Department for Work and Pensions and IT suppliers to the NFI.

Our legal basis for sharing the data is that the processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest.  Where we share special category data, our additional legal basis is that the processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest for the exercise of a function of the Crown, a Minister of the Crown, or a government department.

The personal data we provide will be used by the NFI to match records across different data sources in order to prevent and detect fraud.  More information about how the NFI use personal data

We will not share your personal information with any other third party.

Whether information has to be provided by you, and if so why

The provision of the personal data (as set out above) is required from you to enable us to provide the best possible service to you. We will inform you at the point of collecting information from you, whether you are required to provide the information to us.

If you do not provide this information to us, we may not be able to provide a service to you, we may not be able to accept your licence application or it may delay our ability to provide a prompt and effective service.

How long your personal information will be kept

Records will be retained for a period of six years after the date your HMO licence has expired (if your application is successful), or such other period as we are required to retain such records under statute.

Reasons for collecting and using your personal information

We rely on ‘the performance of public task’ as the lawful basis on which we collect and use your personal data.

Your rights

Under the General Data Protection Regulation you have a number of important rights that may be exercised free of charge. In summary, those include rights to:

• fair processing of information and transparency over how we use your use personal information
• access to your personal information and to certain other supplementary information that this Privacy Notice is already designed to address
• require us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold
• require the erasure of personal information concerning you in certain situations
• receive the personal information concerning you which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to a third party in certain situations
• object at any time to processing of personal information concerning you for direct marketing
• object in certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information
• otherwise restrict our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances

For further information on each of those rights you can visit the Information Commissioner's Office. If you would like to exercise any of those rights, please contact our Data Protection Officer.

In order that we can comply with such a request as soon as possible, it would be useful if you could provide the following information within your initial request:

• let us have enough information to identify you (e.g. reference, account number, user name, registration details),
• let us have proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill), and
• let us know the information to which your request relates

Keeping your personal information secure

We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent personal information from being accidentally lost, or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your personal information to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.

In processing your data we use systems accredited to ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials standard, which includes several layers of security to prevent deliberate or accidental penetration or corruption to our database and to maintain security of data during communication. This includes:

• access to the user interface is controlled via secure username and passwords
• stored passwords are encrypted
• the server sits behind several firewalls, ensuring unauthorised access to the database is prevented
• the solution uses SSL technologies to provide end-to-end encryption between client and server
• our databases use a virtualised server environment, running on an isolated local network, served via a reverse proxy, via adaptive security appliance firewall
• access to the local network is restricted by firewalled (Virtual Private Network) VPN accounts, and only given to senior development team members
• all access to the VPN, and individual server access is logged and access reviewed quarterly as part of our ISO process
• individual user activity on each server is logged and reviewed in addition to general access monitoring
• front-end system logs are maintained on a rolling weekly basis and reviewed as and when any suspicious activity is suspected as per ISO policy

If you would like to find out more about protecting your personal information, please visit Get Safe Online which is supported by HM Government and leading businesses.

How to complain

We hope that our Data Protection Officer can resolve any query or concern you raise about our use of your information. The General Data Protection Regulation also gives you right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. The supervisory authority in the UK is the Information Commissioner telephone: 0303 123 1113.

Changes to this privacy notice

This privacy notice was published on 1 April 2019.

On 24 September 2021 this privacy notice was amended to remove reference to former district councils from the title. 

When amendments are made to this page we will update this section. We recommend that you review this section from time to time so that you are aware of the latest version of this notice.

How to contact us

Please contact our Data Protection Officer if you have any questions about this privacy notice or the information we hold about you. 

Do you need extra help?

If you would like this notice in another format (for example: audio, large print, braille), call customer services on 01305 221000.