Privacy Notices - Damp and mould reporting Privacy Notice

This privacy notice applies to services provided by the Property Conditions Team and tells you what we will do with data collected from your address.

We are proactively looking at how we manage condensation, damp and mould across homes in the borough. 

The information we gain will help to make a difference to our residents’ lives, by ensuring they live in safe and healthy homes.

It will help us to target and tackle damp and mould problems and assist us in developing future investment programmes (building improvements), by making sure that funds are allocated accordingly, to properties and estates identified from the scheme. 

A Privacy Notice is a statement issued by an organisation such as the Council which explains how personal and confidential data about individuals is collected, used and shared.

Swindon Borough Council will act as a “Data Controller” for any personal data that you provide to us. We will ensure that the data given to us is processed in line with our Data Protection Act 2018 /and the UK General Data Protection Regulations. (GDPR).

Personal data relates to a living individual who can be identified from that data. Identification can be by the information alone or in conjunction with any other information in the data controller’s possession or likely to come into such possession. The processing of data is governed by the Data Protection Act 2018/UK GDPR.

We will collect the following details:

• Your name
• Your address
• Your email address
• Your mobile phone number
• Your telephone number
• Information realting to damp, mould and condensation within your Swindon Borough Council property

We comply with our obligations under the UK GDPR by keeping personal data up to date; by storing and destroying it securely; by not collecting or retaining excessive amounts of data; by protecting personal data from loss, misuse, unauthorised access and disclosure and by ensuring that appropriate technical measures are in place to protect personal data.

We collect and hold personal information to enable us to manage our residents’ homes, to proactively look at how we manage condensation, damp and mould across homes in the borough.

Providing this information will enable us to target and tackle damp and mould problems and assist us in developing future investment programmes (building improvements), by making sure that funds are allocated accordingly, to properties and estates identified from the scheme. 

We must always ensure that processing your data is generally lawful, fair and transparent and complies with all the other principles and requirements of the Data Protection ACT 2018/UK GDPR.

Article 6 of GDPR:

• Legal obligation: processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject (Awaab’s Law 2025 & the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023)

We may also use your personal data to ensure that we meet all our legal and statutory duties including, but not limited to, those which apply under the following legislation (including any updates/changes affecting them) and/or contractual agreements:

• Housing Act 2004
• Equality Act 2010
• Localism Act 2010
• Landlord and Tenant Act 1985
• Environmental Protection Act (EPA) (1990)
• Defective Premises Act (DPA) (1972)
• Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) for rented homes within the Housing Act 2004 
• The Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023
• Awaabs Law
• Homelessness Reduction Act 2017
• Local Government Act 1972 (amended 2000)
• Health and Social Care Act 2012
• Construction Regulations 2015
• Tenancy agreement
• Property and estates maintenance and repair
• Other contracts and agreements setting out the terms and conditions of services provided to you by the Housing Department

Personal data may be shared with internal departments in the process of understanding vulnerability or cautionary data and arranging support. This may include Housing Tenancy Services, Adult and Children’s Social Care, Mental Health Services, Repairs, Voids and Lettings, Housing Options, IT, Revenues and Benefits, Tenancy and Corporate Fraud. 

We will share your data with our IT team who will anonymise and aggregate this data for internal reporting and analysing purposes.

There will be times when we are under a legal duty to share information. This includes, but is not limited to:

• disclosure under a court order
• sharing with the Ministry of Justice for inspection purposes
• disclosure to a Regulator if we identify a situation of potential misconduct or if the information is requested.

We will strive to ensure that any personal data in our care will be kept safe and that where your information is disclosed to a third party working on our behalf, we will seek to ensure that they have sufficient systems and procedures in place to prevent the loss or damage of personal data.

We will maintain the reliability, accuracy, completeness and currency of personal data in our databases and to protect the privacy and security of our databases. We keep your personal data only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes for which it was collected.

Our servers and databases are protected by industry standard security technology.

The employees who have access to personal data have been trained to handle such data properly and in accordance with latest regulation.

Under the process for managing the property, the information collected will be destroyed after 85 years.

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

• Your right of access - You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information
• Your right to rectification - You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.
• Your right to erasure - You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.
• Your right to restriction of processing - You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances
• Your right to object to processing - You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances
• Your right to data portability - You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances

In the event that you wish to complain about the way that your personal data has been handled by Swindon Borough Council, you should write to our Data Protection Officer and clearly outline your case. Your complaint will then be investigated in accordance with our customer complaint and data protection incident procedures.

Data Protection Office

You can contact our Data Protection officer by email:

DataProtection@swindon.gov.uk

If you remain dissatisfied with the way your personal data has been handled, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at www.ICO.org.uk.

You may refer the matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office whose contact details are below:
Information Commissioner’s Office

Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Email: casework@ico.org.uk

The ICO website also contains information on data protection and your rights and remedies.
 

You are under no statutory obligation to provide personal data to Swindon Borough Council. However, if you do not provide any data, we may be unable to accurately assess the problem, potentially leading to delays in repairs or a refusal of repairs altogether, which could leave you with an uninhabitable home.

A yearly audit will take place on personal data to ensure that we remain legally compliant in accordance with current data protection legislation.

You are viewing the Privacy Notice for damp and mould reporting.

Read the main Privacy Notice