Who are we?

The Council is a local authority providing a broad range of local government services, including Council Tax billing, social services, processing planning applications, waste collection etc. 

The Council is a registered data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), registration number Z7517364.

As part of the Financial Assessment & Client Affairs Social Care & Support process, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Council will collect personal data about you and your family.

This information collation will include:

• personal circumstances & details about you, such as your address, telephone number, email address, National Insurance number, date of birth, household composition and income & capital details
• agreed care aackages and related charges
• details of any professionals involved in your care including your GP, CPN, or other professionals.
• details of your medical conditions, including your physical and mental health and mental capacity, hospital admissions and discharge information
• details of your current and past support needs
• details of other people supporting you, such as a power of attorney, deputy, advocate
• details of your financial circumstances; including capital (cash, bank accounts, bonds, stocks & shares, investments), property ownership (this may include undertaking Land Registry searches), welfare benefit income, private income (including earnings and pensions), household expenditure (including copies of bills / statements), disability related expenditure
• other relevant information needed to process your claim such as your landlord or care provider details

We will use this data to process your claim and may check some of the information with other sources to ensure this data is accurate.

How we use your personal information

We will collect information about you (where applicable) to:

• process any charges in relation to your care package to determine your Client Contribution
• process (including recovery) any invoices in respect of monies owed towards your client contribution (care charges)
• make payments to you or your care provider in relation to any agreed Social Care packages.
• allow the council to communicate and provide services appropriate to your needs.
• consider deferred payments, disability reductions, appointee ships and other relevant services
• where the processing is necessary to comply with legal obligations, for example the prevention and/or detection of crime including fraud
• protect public funds
• combine information held about you with data held on other council service systems to create a ‘single view’ of you or your family on to one system.  Using our resident’s information in this way is important to us because it enables us to:
  • provide staff with information about what benefits an individual is claiming and what they may be entitled to, to enable targeted income maximisation activity
  • compare debts levels of residents to allow greater prioritisation, debt management and to support residents in paying priority bills and learning general household income management skills
  • support more residents before they reach crisis point and to self manage their financial affairs
  • identify households that are becoming more vulnerable so we can offer support at an earlier stage to help them.  This is known as predictive analytics.  More information about the use of data in predictive analytics can be found on our general privacy notice page

Lawful basis for processing your personal information

The Council has to have a lawful reason to process your information.  As such the Council will process your application as follows: 

The legal gateway to processing your information for these purposes is the Care Act 2014, which gives the Council:

• the power to charge you for adult care and support services (section 14); and
• the duty to carry out an assessment of your financial resources to work out those charges in order to comply with ‘The Care and Support (Assessment of Resources) Regulations’ issued under section 17 and section 125 of the Act
• the duty and power to enter into a Deferred Payment Agreement (DPA) if you meet certain criteria. A DPA is a way of deferring care home costs against the equity in your property, provided you can offer adequate financial security to the Council to secure against the deferred costs. ‘The Care and Support (Deferred Payments) Regulations’ (issued under section 34, section 35 and section 125 of The Care Act 2014) specify what we need to obtain from you to ensure we have adequate financial security
• ‘Social Security (Information-sharing in relation to welfare services etc) Regulations’ issued under sections 30 and 31 of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 allow us to collect, use and store information held by the Department for Work and Pensions about your welfare benefits, for the purpose of completing financial assessments for adult social care services

Protecting your personal information

The Council endeavours to ensure that the services we provide comply with all data protection legislation, for example, the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018). 

The Council has appropriate security and controls in place to prevent data loss, for example, hacking attempts, however, we cannot guarantee that the personal information you submit will not be intercepted.

Sharing your personal information

To process your claim(s) we share information under our legal obligations and with partner organisations, including:

• government departments in connection with a welfare benefit claim, for example, The Department for Work and Pensions
• social care providers such as residential nursing homes, home care providers, prepaid financial service companies, as necessary
• internal Council departments of the purposes of validating any applications or support you may make or have made for other Council services such as Adult Social Care
• on occasions, your information may be accessed by contracted IT support organisations in the delivery of IT support for both the IT infrastructure and associated systems, for the processes detailed in this privacy notice. Access by IT support will only be for such reasons as fixing any technical issues with software, and any viewing of data will be incidental to this

Subject to a legal gateway, your information may also be shared for the prevention of fraud and criminal activity with (list not exhaustive):

• the police
• Immigration Service, Absconder Services and/or UK Border Agency
• health and social care organisations
• other Local Authorities

We will not normally share your information with organisations other than our partner organisations without your consent. However, there may be certain circumstances where we would share without consent, such as where we are required to do so by law, to safeguard public safety, and in risk of harm or emergency situations. Any information which is shared will only be shared on a need-to-know basis, with appropriate individuals. Only the minimum information for the purpose will be shared.

Retaining your personal information

We keep your information for the life of the service and then a further 6 years plus the current financial year, this period is required by the council for legal and audit purposes.  Information identified for destruction will be securely destroyed, in line with data protection legislation.  

Providing accurate Information 

It is important that we hold accurate and up to date information about you in order to assess your needs and deliver the appropriate services. If any of your details have changed, or change in the future, please ensure that you tell us as soon as possible so that we can update your records.

International Transfer of personal information

No information is transferred out of the UK. 

Automated decision-making/profiling

We do not use your personal information for automated decision making.

Cookies

To learn more about cookies, please visit our general privacy notice page.

Your Individual Rights

To learn more about your Individual Rights, or how to raise a concern, please go to our general privacy notice page.

Further Information   

If you have any questions or concerns about how your information is used, please contact the Financial Assessments team on email financial.assessments@lbbd.gov.uk or Client Affairs on email client.affairs@lbbd.gov.uk in the first instance. 

You can also contact the Data Protection Officer, Client Unit, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, 1 Town Hall, First Floor, Barking, IG11 7LU.  Email dpo@lbbd.gov.uk

More information about data protection and how it applies to you can be found on the Information Commissioner's Office website.

Last Reviewed   

Date: 31/03/2025