St Edmundsbury Borough Council respects the privacy of all site visitors and subsequently complies with all statutory data protection provisions applicable to England and Wales. To meet industry standard security levels and best practice, appropriate technologies, methodologies, software and hardware are used to safeguard all data and systems. Information submitted may be stored and used to process any requests; it will be retained for a reasonable period. Where a business transaction is then enacted commercial records may be retained for up to seven years. In submitting information to this site via forms or email, the act of clicking on the submit button is taken as explicit consent to allow the use, collection, processing and storage of that information.

All of our employees who have access to your personal data (such as name, address, phone number and email) are contractually obliged to respect the confidentiality of your personal data. We take appropriate steps to communicate our ICT Security Policy (PDF 455Kb) and guidelines to all our employees. Only authorised employees will have access to your personal information. While we do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of the information until it is within our control. You need to take precautions when on the internet and never give personal information unless you are on a secure page on a trusted website.

Cookies

A cookie is a small piece of text stored on your computer, phone or whatever you use to surf the Internet. Cookies have many uses, but fundamentally they are used to store information about you on your computer.

Cookies are not needed to use the site. However cookies maybe used to track how people use the St Edmundsbury Borough Council website such as which pages they are viewing. No personal information is collected. This information is used to improve the website functionality and design.

To delete cookies or reject cookies

If you do not want to receive cookies from this website, select cookie settings under the privacy settings in your browser options, then add our domain to the list of websites you do not want to accept cookies from.

Under settings you can also delete individual cookies or any cookies that your browser has stored.

You can find more information on how to delete and control cookies at http://www.allaboutcookies.org If you set your browser to refuse cookies, please be aware that there may be functionality on various websites that do not work.

Webserver log files

The webserver has software, which logs which pages are viewed, other general information such as which country the page is being viewed from, which search words are used and from which site they came from. This information is used to give basic statistical information on how the site is used. These files do not contain any personal information or information about which other sites you have visited.

Applications for services, PDF downloads and online forms

As part of the government standards, more forms or applications for service are available online. Depending on the form or service, the information provided may interface directly with the main software application used by the St Edmundsbury Borough Council to record, provide or process the information; or the information may be held by the software and passed on to the appropriate system or person. As it is not possible to authenticate who may have supplied information the council cannot be held responsible for any acts of impersonation and will assume all information submitted is genuine unless there is reason to doubt its authenticity. If you suspect that a false entry has been made using your identity please advise the council and appropriate corrective action will be considered.

How we use your information - and the National Fraud Initiative (NFI)

The information you give when you complete and return a form electronically or on paper will be held in accordance with current data protection legislation.

St Edmundsbury Borough Council is required by law to protect the public funds it administers. It may share information provided to it with other bodies responsible for auditing or administering public funds, in order to prevent and detect fraud.

The Audit Commission appoints the auditor to audit the accounts of this council. It is also responsible for carrying out data matching exercises.

Data matching involves comparing computer records held by one body against other computer records held by the same or another body. This is usually personal information. Computerised data matching allows potentially fraudulent claims and payments to be identified. Where a match is found it indicates that there is an inconsistency which requires further investigation. No assumption can be made as to whether there is fraud, error or other explanation until an investigation is carried out.

The Audit Commission currently requires us to participate in a data matching exercise to assist in the prevention and detection of fraud. We are required to provide particular sets of data to the Audit Commission for matching for each exercise, and these are set out in the Audit Commission’s handbooks, which can be found at www.audit-commission.gov.uk/nfi.

The use of data by the Audit Commission in a data matching exercise is carried out with statutory authority under its powers in Part 2A of the Audit Commission Act 1998. It does not require the consent of the individuals concerned under the Data Protection Act 1998.

Data matching by the Audit Commission is subject to a Code of Practice. This may be found at www.audit-commission.gov.uk/nfi.

For further information on the Audit Commission’s legal powers and the reasons why it matches particular information, see the Level 3 Notice on the Audit Commission website or contact Peter Yetzes, Head of National Fraud Initiative (NFI) on 0844 798 2222 or email nfiqueries@audit-commission.gov.uk

Links to other websites

Our website contains links to other websites, which include public authorities, government departments other organisations. This privacy statement only applies to our website.

Other information sent to us

You can send us your feedback by using the forms, email addresses or by telephoning or writing to us using the contact details published in various parts of the site.