Early Help for Children, Young People and Families Privacy Notice

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

This notice provides additional privacy information for:

  • Children, young people and families accessing early help services. This includes early help services delivered in localities through Early Help Hubs, Integrated Youth Services and Place Based Integration Services
  • Children, young people and families with a range of problems often struggle to get the right help and support at the right time in the right way.
  • To ensure that children, young people and families get the early help that they need to enable them to improve their lives Trafford Council and its partners are committed to working across organisations to coordinate help and support when it is most needed.
  • An early help offer for families also meets the Government’s requirements to deliver the National Troubled Families Programme in our area.

Purposes

The Council and its partner organisations are working closely to ensure that services are more joined up. To help us do this, we collect and obtain your personal informaiton for the following purpose(s)

    • To identify children, young people and families who are eligible for help and support
    • To understand and meet the needs of children, young people and families
    • To ensure services across a range of organisations are coordinated and focused on children, young people and families with the most pressing and complex needs
    • To participate in local and national research to assess how well the services are working in delivering better long term outcomes for children, young people and families and in making services more effective.

Categories of personal data

In order to carry out these purposes we collect and obtain personal records that relate to you. This might include records in relation to your social care, any involvement with the police, courts and probation, aspects relating to employment, anti-social behaviour, violence in the home, substance misuse, educational attendance and behaviour, vulnerable children and health issues. In addition to this, personal information will be used to evaluate how successful and effective early help services are at both local and national level.

Legal basis for processing

In order to provide our voluntary early help service, we need to collect and share personal information about you, so we can refer you to the right support services for you and your family. We will ask for your consent to do this (Article 6(1) (a) GDPR).

We also ask for special category information about you, in order to match you with the best support possible to meet your needs. You do not have to provide us with this information in order to receive our services, but if we are able to collect and share this information with our support services, it helps them to plan and provide support that will best meet the needs of you and your family. Again, we will ask for your express consent to do this. Article 9(2)(a) GDPR).

Some aspects of our early help services, including those delivered as part of the Troubled Families Programme are provided in accordance with specific legal duties or in order to deliver our public tasks. The relevant lawful bases under GDPR to process your personal data for these purposes are Article 6(1) (c) (legal obligation), Article 6(1) (e) (Public task) and, In terms of special category data, Article 9(2) (g) (substantial public interest on basis of member state law). Relevant legislation includes:

  • The Children Act 1989/2004
  • the Children and Families Act 2014
  • Statutory Guidance of 2013, 2015 and 2018, Working Together to Safeguard Children
  • the Education Act 1996/2002/2011
  • Crime and Disorder Act 1998
  • Housing Act 1996
  • Homelessness Act 2002
  • Welfare Reform Act 2012
  • Localism Act 2011
  • Digital Economy Act 2017

There may also be situations where personal data must be processed e.g. if it is necessary to protect someone in an emergency (Article 6(1)(d)) or otherwise required by law e.g. to address safeguarding concerns (Article 6(1) (c))

National research

At national level, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has commissioned the Office of National Standards (ONS) to undertake national research to evaluate the effectiveness of the National Troubled Families Programme.

Local Authorities and national Government departments are being asked to contribute to this research study. This means that a small amount of basic personal information supplied by the Council about individual family members (such as name, address, date of birth, sex and unique identifiers such as Unique Pupil numbers) together with family level information about issues within the family and services accessed, such as:

  • Crime or antisocial behavior
  • Children who have not been attending school regularly
  • Children who need help: children of all ages, who need help, are identified as in need or are subject to a Child Protection Plan
  • Adults out of work or at risk of financial exclusion or young people at risk of worklessness
  • Families affected by domestic violence and abuse
  • Parents of children with a range of health problems
  • Families at risk of homelessness
  • The type of support the family received and when

This is linked with personal information held by national Government departments. The research aims to compare the outcomes between those families receiving help and those who are not. This will determine whether new ways of working changes lives for the better by, for example, reducing offending, truancy and getting people ready for work. This will also help inform improvements to the service over time.

Personal information linked for research purposes at national level will:

  • Only be used for research
  • Will be anonymised so the researchers will not know whose data they have
  • Be kept securely to prevent any unauthorised use
  • Will not be used for making decisions about families or individuals
  • Not be shared back with the local authority
  • Be destroyed once the research project is concluded

The national departments involved in this research are listed below:

  • Ministry of Justice (Police National Computer and prison database)
  • Department for Education (national Pupil Database and individual learner record)
  • Department for Work and Pensions (Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study)

We will only receive information about the local authority results of the nation research in anonymised form and any reports published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) will ensure that families and individuals are not identifiable.

Information sharing/recipients

To ensure that support can be offered to those with the most pressing need and to coordinate early help in the right way at the right time, we may share personal information about you with the following types of organisations:

  • Commissioned Providers (e.g. a charity or other organisation that we ask to provide services on our behalf)
  • Schools
  • Trafford Clinical Commissioning Group
  • Manchester Foundation Trust
  • Great Manchester Police
  • Great Manchester Fire Service
  • Department of Work and Pensions
  • Registered Housing Providers
  • Probation / Community Rehabilitation
  • Other Local Authorities

Data transfers beyond EEA

This is covered in Trafford Council’s primary privacy notice.

Automated decisions

For this service, all the decisions we make about you involve human intervention.

Data retention

Our Retention Schedule outlines how long we retain certain types of information for.

Rights of individuals

Please see Trafford Council’s primary privacy notice for information about:

  • exercising your rights
  • contacting our Data Protection Officer
  • raising a concern with us, or
  • making a complaint to the Information Commissioner

Updates (notice)

We may update or revise this Privacy Notice at any time so please refer back to this page for the most up-to-date version.

This page was last modified: Tuesday 6 August 2019 12:00