Safe and Well Visits Privacy Notice

Your privacy is important to us. This privacy statement explains what personal data Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service collects about you and how we store and use that data.

Personal data is processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR).

A Safe and Well Visit is a person centred service tailored to individual needs, focused on making eligible residents safer in their homes. The visit relates to health and wellbeing issues in addition to fire risk reduction and is carried out by our Firefighters, Safe and Well Technicians and Volunteers.

What information we collect about you

Prior to your Safe and Well Visit, we may have received some of your personal information as a result of a request from you or another individual (such as a family member, friend or neighbour), or we may have received a referral from an external agency or organisation (such as local authorities, health partners, housing associations, and care agencies).

The personal information we collect when providing the service of a Safe and Well Visit, includes:

Contact details (such as name, address, telephone/ mobile number, email address)
Personal information of the householder and family members (such as age, date of birth)
Health and lifestyle information that may indicate an increased fire risk in the home (such as smoking, disabilities/illnesses, or mobility restrictions)
If a referral has been received, we will also retain the referrer’s details, which may include name, telephone number, email address, relationship to referred individual, and name of agency or organisation
Your agreement to a follow up visit (Safe and Well revisit) if required, to provide you with further advice and support
Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) monitoring data such as gender, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and age range (optional).

We recognise that information particularly about your health and lifestyle, is more sensitive, so we only collect the minimum amount that enables us to adequately assess all risk factors that might make you more vulnerable to fire and other incidents in your home.

To enable us to deliver targeted Safe and Well Visits, we collate personal information from data sets shared with us by NHS England for the purpose of identifying older people in the community that might be more at risk of fire, and Dolby Vivisol (Oxygen Users Data); we also use demographic data from Experian.

Why we need it

Under the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004, Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service have a legal duty to promote fire safety in its area, to prevent fires and instances of fire related death and injury.

We collect this information in our official authority as a Fire and Rescue Service to promote fire safety and we use this information to:

Record and evaluate the level of service we provide to communities to deliver an inclusive Safe and Well visit – to help with this you may be asked to take part in a survey
Gather and analyse information on the support needed within the communities we serve to ensure the inclusion of seldom heard and most at risk groups
Help you contact other services which may benefit you and improve your safety and wellbeing
Record information that would indicate a risk to life or property and may be used by operational staff during an incident, helping to protect life and property
To provide statistics (anonymised data) to the Government – for further information visit the GOV.UK website

You are not obliged to give us this information but without it, we may not be able to offer relevant advice or services.

Please also refer to the Safe and Well Visit Survey privacy notice.

Our legal basis for processing

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), we are able to process your personal data under article 6(1)(c) necessary for compliance with a legal obligation, and 6(1)(e) necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller.

If you provide us with special category data, for example health information the legal basis to process this is under article 9(2)(g) necessary for reasons of substantial public interest on the basis of domestic law which is proportionate to the aim pursued and which contains appropriate safeguarding measures, or for EDI monitoring data article 9(2)(a) the data subject has given explicit consent.

We will only refer you to an external agency if you provide us with your consent (under article 6(1)(a)).

What we do with it

All personal information is stored in our internal system where access is only granted to those who need it to undertake their role.

We will make any external agency referrals via a secure emailing system, only sharing information you have consented to.

Sharing your information

There are a number of reasons why we may share your information outside of our Service. This can be due to:

Our obligations to comply with current legislation
Our duty to comply with a Court Order
You have consented to the sharing / disclosure

We work alongside external agencies, such as Age UK, Age UK Berkshire, and Falls Prevention Teams based in each local authority, and will only share your information with them if you have consented for us to do so.

We may disclose information to other agencies without consent where it is necessary, either to comply with a legal obligation, or where permitted under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, e.g. where the disclosure is necessary for the purposes of the prevention and/or detection of crime.

We work closely with other agencies, such as councils, health services, adult and children’s services and may, for the purpose of preventing risk of harm to yourself or another individual, share your personal information.

As a public authority, we are also subject to information rights legislation (Freedom of Information Act 2000, Environmental Information Regulations 2004 and Data Protection legislation. We do receive requests for information, however, unless there is a legal obligation to provide your personal data, information will be released in a redacted form. This means your personal data will be removed before publication so that you cannot be identified.

Your personal information will not be transferred outside of the European Economic Area (EEA).

For further information about organisations who share personal data with us please refer to the following:

NHS Data – Fair Processing Statement;

Dolby Vivisol (Oxygen users data) Privacy Notice.

How long we keep it and how it is stored

We will only retain information for as long as necessary. Records are maintained in line with our retention schedule, which determines the length of time records should be kept.

Consequently, personal information relating to: Safe and Well Visits will be retained for seven (7) years.

If safeguarding issues were identified during a Safe and Well Visit the retention of this information may be different. Please refer to the Safeguarding Privacy Notice for further information.

Information used for operational purposes will be retained for seven (7) years unless reviewed or updated.

We take our duty to protect your personal information and confidentiality seriously. We are committed to taking all reasonable measures to ensure the confidentiality and security of personal data for which we are responsible, whether computerised or on paper. This means that your information will be kept in a secure environment and access to it will be restricted according to the ‘need to know’ principle. Personal details will then be destroyed/deleted.

We do compile and publish statistics showing certain information, but not in a form which identifies anyone.

Your rights

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation you are entitled to exercise your right to object to us processing your data and obtain information that is held about you.

If at any point you believe the information we process on you is incorrect, you can request to have it corrected or deleted. Where possible we will seek to comply with your request but we may be required to hold or process information to comply with a legal requirement.

If you wish to discuss the information we hold about you, make a complaint about how we have handled your personal data or object to us processing it, you can contact our Data Protection Officer (DPO) who will investigate the matter.

Further information about your individual rights is available on the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website – Your data matters.