Development Management (Enforcement) Privacy Notice
As the Local Planning Authority, Lancaster City Council collects, processes and stores personal information about you in order to investigate enforcement complaints in respect of potential breaches of planning legislation.
We are committed to protecting your privacy, and this notice is made in light of the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 and Data Protection Act 2018 in order to advise you how we use your personal information.
When do we collect personal information?
We collect information from you during the process of receipt and investigation of any enforcement complaint (including when you report an issue to us) and during any formal enforcement proceedings. This includes information disclosed to us during contact by email, letter, telephone, or in person.
We may also receive information about you from third parties, including complainants, landlords, tenants, the local police, government agencies and other local authorities.
What personal information do we collect?
The types of personal information we collect may include:
- Basic personal information including name, address and contact details;
- Information relating to criminal convictions and offences (including alleged offences, and proceedings for offences) under planning legislation; and
- Any other information you provide to us during the application or investigation process.
How do we use your personal information?
We use the information we collect in order to determine:
- Whether there is a breach of planning legislation
- Whether it is expedient to pursue action to remedy a breach of planning legislation
- What enforcement method is proportionate to remedy the breach in question
We do this because it is part of our public task as a Local Planning Authority to investigate and take appropriate action in response to breaches or alleged breaches.
We also use your personal information to communicate the progress and outcomes of Enforcement Investigations to you. We do not use the information provided for any other purposes unless we are required to do so by law.
We have a retention schedule and related processes in place to ensure that data we no longer need is deleted from our systems. Some information about formal enforcement proceedings must be retained indefinitely (this is required by law).
Do we share your information with anyone else?
When you have made a complaint
We consider all complaints to be made in confidence, and where possible we will not disclose your identity when you have made a complaint or reported a potential breach. However, please be aware that in many cases your identity may be clear from the circumstances of the complaint.
Information to be made publicly available
In order to comply with our statutory obligations, we must make certain details about formal enforcement proceedings available in the form of a public register. Regulations also permit and actively encourage this information to be made available online. This includes details of the breach and where it occurred.
Sharing information with other organisations
In the event of formal enforcement proceedings being instigated, we will share relevant documents (which may include some personal information about the complainant(s) and alleged contravener(s)) with solicitors or barristers acting on the Council’s behalf. If an appeal is lodged against a decision we make, the Government’s Planning Inspectorate, who considers the appeal, will also ask for copies of all relevant documents and details of the formal enforcement proceedings.
We sometimes pass your information to third party suppliers providing services such as data hosting, scanning and printing. These suppliers only use your data on our instructions. They won’t use it for any other reason, will look after it in the same way we would, and will destroy any personal data we share with them as soon as it is no longer required.
We will not share your information with any other organisations unless required to do so by law.
Sharing information within Lancaster City Council
During the course of our investigations, where we deem it appropriate to seek evidence or information pertaining to the alleged breach, we may share personal information with other services within the Council.
Your rights and how to find out more
You have a number of rights under data protection law, including the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you, and the right to object to our use of your information in certain circumstances.
For further information about your rights, how the Council uses your information, and how to get in touch if you have a query or complaint, please see the Council’s main privacy notice.
We reserve the right to amend this privacy notice at any time. However, we take your privacy very seriously and will never change our policies or practices to make them less protective of your personal information.
If we make any changes to this policy that significantly affect you, we will aim to notify you directly if we hold contact details for you. You will always be able to find the most up-to-date version of this policy on our website at this address: www.lancaster.gov.uk/privacy-plan-enf.
This Version: v1, July 2018
Last updated: 03 February 2022