Recruitment & Employment Privacy Notice

Trafford Council needs to hold and process information about employees, workers and other individuals as appropriate, for various reasons. We are committed to protecting your personal information and to being transparent about what information we hold and why.

It is important that you read this notice, together with any other privacy information we may provide on specific occasions, when we are collecting or processing personal information about you, so that you are aware of how and why we are using such information.

Our core data protection obligations and commitments are set out in the Council’s primary privacy notice.

This notice provides additional privacy information for the following.

  • Job applicants.
  • Employees and former employees. –Workers and former workers (including agency, casual and contractors).
  • Volunteers.
  • Trainees and those carrying out work experience.

This privacy notice describes how we collect, use and share personal information about you before, during and after your working relationship with us. It also details the types of personal information we need to process, including information the law describes as ‘special’ because of its sensitivity.

Purpose(s) of processing personal data

The main reasons for processing your personal information are as follows.

  • Undertaking pre-employment and verification checks during the recruitment process.
  • Making a decision about your recruitment or appointment.
  • Determining the terms on which you work for us.
  • Check you are legally entitled to work in the UK.
  • Giving you the opportunity to undertake work experience.
  • Paying you and, if you are an employee, deducting tax and National Insurance contributions.
  • Liaising with your pension provider.
  • Administering the contract we have entered into with you.
  • Giving you access to appropriate Council premises.
  • Business management and planning, including accounting and auditing.
  • Conducting performance reviews, managing performance and determining performance requirements.
  • Making decisions about salary reviews and compensation.
  • Assessing qualifications for a particular job or task, including decisions about promotions.
  • Ensuring you maintain membership of a professional body, where required by your role.
  • Offering and administration of employee benefits and employee engagement events.
  • Gathering evidence for possible grievance or disciplinary hearings.
  • Making decisions about your continued employment or engagement.
  • Making arrangements for the termination of our working relationship.
  • Education, training and development requirements.
  • Dealing with legal disputes involving you, or other employees, workers and contractors, including accidents at work.
  • Ascertaining your fitness to work.
  • Managing sickness absence.
  • Complying with health and safety obligations and public access legislation.
  • To prevent fraud, including sharing and matching of personal information for the national fraud initiative.
  • For prevention and detection of crime.
  • Ensuring we are legally compliant in areas such as the National Minimum Wage and Working Time Regulations amongst others.
  • To conduct data analytics studies to review and better understand employee retention and turnover rates.
  • To ensure that we communicate key Council information to you.

  • Undertaking staff surveys with the aim of improving employee engagement and experience.
  • Contacting you, next of kin or other relevant contact in case of an emergency.
  • For equal opportunities monitoring purposes.

Categories of personal data

In order to carry out our activities and obligations as an employer we process personal information in relation to the following.

  • Personal demographics (including date of birth, gender, marital or civil partnership status etc.
  • Photographs, CCTV footage and other information obtained through electronic means such as swipe card records.
  • Contact details such as names, addresses, personal email address, telephone numbers and Emergency contact(s).
  • Recruitment records (including CV, application form, references, pre-employment and verification checks).
  • Employment records (including your workplace, job title, national insurance number, training records, professional memberships, proof of eligibility to work in the UK and security checks).
  • Bank account details, payroll records and tax status information.
  • Salary, annual leave, pension and benefits information.
  • Information relating to health and safety (including accident and incident details).
  • Information about your use of our information and communications systems.
  • Disciplinary, Grievance and other employee relations information (including Employment Tribunal applications, complaints).

We may also collect, store and use the following special and sensitive personal information as follows:

  • Information about your race or ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation (including ensuring meaningful equal opportunities monitoring and reporting).
  • Trade union membership (including complying with employment law and paying subscriptions).
  • Medical information including physical health or mental condition, sickness and occupational health records (including to comply with employment and other laws, ensure health & safety, assess fitness to work and monitor and manage absence).
  • Offences (including alleged offences), criminal proceedings, outcomes and sentences.

We will only collect information about criminal convictions if it is appropriate for the employment role and where we are legally permitted or required to do so. We collect information about criminal convictions as part of the recruitment process or may be notified of information directly by you or a 3rd party in the course of your recruitment or employment. We may use information about criminal convictions and offences in the following ways which will depend on the nature of the offence/conviction.

  • To decide whether we can offer employment.
  • To decide whether duties need to be restricted and to review this if the circumstances change.
  • To
    decide whether we can continue employment, or whether we may need to terminate employment.
  • To make other appropriate bodies aware of the issues.
  • To check if there are any safeguarding issues that need to be acted upon.
  • To check historical working practice in case there are implications around fraud or other issues.

Legal basis for processing

The legal bases we rely on for processing your personal information are as follows.

  • Entering into or performing obligations under your contract of employment.
  • Performing or exercising obligations or rights under employment law, social security law or social protection.
  • General legal obligations we must meet.
  • Where it is needed to assess your working capacity on health grounds, subject to appropriate confidentiality safeguards.
  • Where it is needed in relation to exercising or defending legal rights (e.g. in relation to legal proceedings and claims).
  • Fraud prevention and protection of public funds.
  • Compliance with any Court Orders.
  • Where it is needed to protect your interests (or someone else's interests) and you are not capable of giving your consent.
  • Your consent (in situations where you have a genuine choice and control over whether your information is processed, including the right to withdraw your consent at any time without detriment).
  • Our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) provided your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.

Examples of our legitimate interests are as follows (this list isn’t exhaustive).

  • To monitor your use of our information and communication systems to ensure compliance with our IT policies.
  • To ensure network and information security, including preventing unauthorised access to our computer and electronic communications systems and preventing malicious software distribution.

We do not need your consent to use personal or special categories of your personal information to carry out our legal obligations or exercise specific rights in the field of employment law, social security and social protection.

In limited circumstances, we may approach you for your written consent to allow us to process your personal information. If we do so, we will provide you with full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you can carefully consider whether you wish to consent. You should be aware that it is not a condition of your contract with us that you agree to any request for consent from us and that where consent is given, you have the right to withdraw it at any time (without affecting the lawfulness of our processing prior to the withdrawal of your consent).

Failure to provide required information

If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have entered into with you (such as paying you or providing a benefit), or we may be prevented from complying with our legal obligations (such as to ensure the health and safety of our workers).

This could damage the employment relationship /result in breach of contract. If you do not provide information which we need we will take appropriate action based on the circumstances.

Information sharing

In addition to the general reasons for information sharing described in the council’s primary privacy notice, we may share information about you with third parties as follows.

  • Where required by law, where necessary to fulfil your contract of employment or where we or a third party has a legitimate interest.
  • For the purposes of the National Fraud Initiative conducted by central government under Section 33 and Schedule 9 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014.
  • In connection with school workforce census as provided for in Section 114 of the Education Act 2005 and the associated Education (Supply of Information about the School Workforce) (No.2) (England) Regulations 2007/2260, which affects some directly employed council staff working in education.
  • To offer you work-related benefits.
  • To undertake employee engagement surveys.
  • To enable you to pay union subscriptions directly from your salary.

Other sources of personal data

As well as information collected directly from you, we may also collect or receive information from the following.

  • Former employers.
  • Referees.
  • Employment agencies.
  • Disclosure and Barring Service.
  • Complainants (e.g. service users/employees).
  • Next of kin.
  • Health professionals.
  • Professional bodies.
  • Benefits providers.
  • Trade Unions.
  • Apprenticeship scheme – check with Tracey as had 3rd party on the audit.
  • Pensions providers.
  • Occupational Health.
  • GPs or medical provider
  • Other public bodies and public sources, if relevant to employment and job role.

Automated decisions

When we process your personal data all the decisions we make about you involve human intervention, so we don’t make any automated decisions.

Data retention/criteria

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any future legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

Once your employment ends we must continue to retain necessary information for a period of 6 years and for pensionable employees, certain employment records must be kept until after pension benefits become payable. There are certain other exceptions to this in line with relevant statutory requirements.

The Human Resources Records Retention Schedule outlines how long we retain different types of information for.

Rights of individuals and how to raise a concern

You have a number of legal rights in relation to your personal information. These apply regardless of your employment status with the Council.

You have a right to be informed about how and why your personal information is being processed. This notice fulfils that obligation. You also have a number of other rights.

In our Guide to exercising your rights you can find information about the following.

  • Your rights and how to exercise them.
  • Contacting our Data Protection Officer (DPO).
  • Raising a concern with us.
  • Making a complaint to the Information Commissioner.

Updates

We may update or revise this Privacy Notice from time to time and provide supplementary privacy information as is necessary to the Council’s current workforce. Please revisit this page for the most up-to-date version.

 

This page was last modified: Wednesday 25 May 2022 15:40