The Community Safety Unit includes services of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit, Emergency Planning, Gangs Violence and Exploitation Unit, the Law Enforcement Team, Modern Slavery and Exploitation, Video Surveillance System (commonly referred to as CCTV), Violence Against Women and Girls, and the Community Safety Partnership.
To deliver community safety services we may collect personal information about you including:
- Name
- Address
- Date of birth
- Gender
- Images collected through bodycams
- CCTV images
- Contact information
- Description of events
We may also collect special category information about you including:
- Health
- Race
- Religion
- Vulnerability
- Sexuality
We use this information to investigate and prevent crime and disorder, to reduce the fear of crime, safeguard vulnerable members of our communities, bring offenders to justice, increase community safety, and to share as intelligence with partners.
We also use personal information to issue fixed penalty notices in line with our statutory duties.
We're very serious about protecting your privacy and take all possible steps to keep your information safe. We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use and share your information in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation.
Data controller
Hammersmith & Fulham Council is the data controller of any personal information that you provide to us.
Legal purpose
The processing of your personal information is necessary for compliance with the legal obligation contained in the following Acts, to facilitate a statutory obligation, and to provide council services (this list is not exhaustive):
- The Anti-social behaviour Act 2003
- The Anti-social Crime & Policing Act 2014
- The Police & Criminal Evidence Act 1984
- Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000
- The Localism Act 2011
- The Crime & Disorder Act 1998
- The Environmental Protection Act 1990
- Housing Acts 1985, 1996 and 2004
- Homelessness Reduction Act 2018
- Stray Dogs under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 (Section 149)
What we do with the information we collect
Your personal information will be treated as confidential but it may be shared with other council services. We may also need to share your information with our partners in the Hammersmith & Fulham community safety partnership where circumstances or the law require. These partners include:
- The Metropolitan Police and other crime enforcement agencies.
- Other local authorities
- Third sector organisations working with the council
- London Ambulance Service
- London Fire Brigade
- Courts and judicial agencies
- Registered social landlords
- Commissioned providers, where the disclosure is necessary to fulfil our statutory obligation or for the prevention or detection of crime
These service providers are obliged to keep your details securely, use them only to fulfil the request and dispose of the information in line with their own retention periods.
If you require an interpreter or document translation, your data may be shared with our translation and interpretation service in order to provide this service. Data shared with our translation and interpretation service will be only for the explicit purpose of completing the translation/interpretation and will not be shared for any other purpose.
Your information will be held and used in accordance with the requirements of UK and European data protection law.
Data protection
All the information we collect is stored securely on our IT systems and manual filing systems. We have strict procedures for the way this is done. Any and all information about you is treated as confidential and with respect. There are also clear rules and guidance about storing, recording and sharing information which staff receive training on.
We take information sharing very seriously. Appropriate council staff are DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checked. Any member of staff who is found to be breaking the rules will be dealt with through appropriate disciplinary procedures.
The information we hold will not be stored in or accessible from countries with non- UK-equivalent Privacy Law protections.
Data retention
We will only keep your information for as long as it is required by us or other regulatory bodies in order to comply with legal and statutory requirements. This can be for a period of up to 6 years. However, some records relating to criminal activity may need to be kept in perpetuity.
CCTV images supplied to the police as evidence will be retained for 1 year. Any footage that is not used will be automatically deleted from our servers after a period of 30 days.
Marketing and e-newsletters
Hammersmith & Fulham Council always acts upon your choices around what type of communications you want to receive and how you want to receive them. Where you have signed up for one of our newsletters, we use email newsletters to inform you of what we're doing, news and events.
Tools may be used to help us improve the effectiveness of our communications with you, including tracking whether the emails we send are opened and which links are clicked within a message. This helps us to improve and refine future email marketing around our campaigns and make sure all our emails are relevant and useful as possible.
You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us. If though you no longer want to receive our e-newsletters, then you can do this by clicking the unsubscribe link on every email.
Business intelligence, profiling and automated-decision making
We may analyze your personal information to improve services and for the following purposes:
- undertake statutory functions efficiently and effectively
- service planning by understanding your needs to provide the services that you request
- understanding what we can do for you and inform you of other relevant services and benefits
- help us to build up a picture of how we are performing at delivering services to you and what services the people of Hammersmith & Fulham need
- analysis of costs and spend of services we provide so that we can to ensure better and efficient use of public funds
- evaluating, monitoring health of the Hammersmith & Fulham population and protecting and improving public health
The council is however committed to using pseudonymized or anonymized information as much as is practical, and in many cases, this will be the default position.
Pseudonymisation is a procedure by which the most identifying fields within a data record are replaced by one or more artificial identifiers, or pseudonyms. There can be a single pseudonym for a collection of replaced fields or a pseudonym per replaced field.
Anonymisation is the process of removing identifying particulars or details from (something, especially medical test results) for statistical or other purposes.
Developing and testing business applications
The London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham may use the information you give us to maintain and improve the services which we deliver, this includes developing and upgrading the systems which we use to process your information.
Your rights
Our use of your data will be subject to the following legal rights:
- Your right to be Informed
- Your right to access your personal data
- Your right for us to rectify your personal data
- Your right to restrict our processing of your personal data
You have the right of access to the personal data we process about you, and in this instance, the right of objection and/or restriction to the processing.
For details of how to submit a request see data protection and subject access requests.
Further information
- The ICO Guide to the General Data Protection Regulation 2016
- The General Data Protection Regulation 2016
If you have concerns
You have the right to complain to us if you think we have not complied with our obligation for handling your personal information.
Email: residentexpteam@lbhf.gov.uk
If you still have concerns following our response you have the right to raise the matter with the Information Commissioner's Office.