City plan part 2 examination hearings privacy notice

Brighton & Hove City Council is committed to protecting your personal information. As a data controller we have a responsibility to make sure you know why your personal information is being collected and how it will be used in accordance with relevant data protection law.

The primary laws which governs how Brighton & Hove City Council collects and uses personal information (known as “data”) about you are:

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998

This privacy notice explains how personal information in relation to the participants of hearings sessions held as part of the examination of the Brighton & Hove City Plan Part Two.

Hearing sessions are events chaired by a Planning Inspector who has been appointed by the Secretary of State to examine the various policies and proposals in an authority’s Local Plan.

Where hearing sessions take place virtually, participants are able to attend either through video conferencing (through ‘Microsoft Teams’) or via telephone (dialling in on a landline or mobile phone).

This notice is additional to the standards and notices published by the Planning Service at Brighton & Hove City Council including that made available at the Regulation 19 consultation period.

There is also a specific notice which covers the Planning Inspectorate, the Planning Inspectorate’s Customer Privacy Notice

Who is processing your data

Brighton & Hove City Council will be the data controller for the data you provide to us. For the purposes of the hearing sessions the Local Plan Examination, the Planning Inspectorate and the Local Planning Authority are joint controllers of your personal data because we jointly determine the purposes and means of processing. We will make use of services provided by third party organisations to process your data on our behalf (for example, hosting meetings on Microsoft Teams and live streaming via YouTube).

The online/ virtual hearing sessions will be held on Microsoft Teams. How we will use the information we hold about you Information is received from representations made to the Proposed Submission City Plan Part 2 Document published in accordance with Regulation 19 of the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations.

If you are invited to participate in the hearing sessions being held virtually, the authority will use your audio and visual data as part of a livestream broadcast through the council’s YouTube channel. The virtual hearing will not be retained after the event.

If you are invited to participate in a virtual hearing, you will be required to provide the following types of personal data:

Name
Email address
Telephone number (landline or mobile phone)

Metadata may be taken from joining the virtual meeting including an IP address, joining account information and browser type (if a browser is being used instead of the Microsoft Teams App). Cookies are also collected by Microsoft when using the ‘Teams’ platform, which is covered by the Microsoft Privacy Statement.

During the course of the hearing session, the following types of data will be displayed to other participants:

Your voice, if your device microphone is switched on and you speak at a hearing session
Your image, if your device camera is switched on will be recorded when participating at a hearing session
If participants join using Dial-In option the phone number is masked for all participants including meeting organiser
Your name will appear and be recorded when invited to speak and it will be displayed during the meeting

The live stream of the hearing sessions will be made publicly available on the council’s YouTube channel. Anyone who chooses to watch the live stream or recording of a hearing session will be able to see you (if you connect by video), listen to what you say, and see your name.

How the law allows us to use your information

The council has a legal obligation to process the data. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 section 20 (6) states that: Any person who makes representations seeking to change a development plan document must (if he so requests) be given the opportunity to appear before and be heard by the person carrying out the examination.

Who we share the information with The Planning Inspectorate

The Programme Officer appointed by the council but who supports the Inspector. The council has a Data Sharing Agreement in place with the Programme Officer and with the Planning Inspectorate for the duration of the examination. The Planning Inspectorate will be a joint data controller for the purposes of conducting the virtual hearings. The Programme office will be a data processor, administering attendance at the hearing session.

How long we keep your personal information

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 legal or reporting requirements, which is three months after the date of adoption of the City Plan Part Two. Your personal data will only be available for the duration of the hearing session that you are participating in. No copies of the recording will be retained by the council.

How your data will be stored

Your personal data will only be stored and processed on servers based within the UK. During the lives treaming of the event the content will be available on the internet.

How we protect your data

Examples of the security measures we use:

training for our staff making them aware of how to handle information securely and how and when to report when something goes wrong
we use encryption when data is sent, meaning that information is scrambled so that it cannot be read without access to an unlock key, the hidden information is said to then be ‘encrypted’
data will be pseudonymised where possible, meaning that your identity will be removed, so work can be done without your identity being known by the people doing the work
controlling access to systems and networks to stop people who are not allowed to view your personal information from getting access to it
regular testing of our technology and ways of working, including keeping up to date on the latest security updates (commonly called patches)

Transferring data outside the United Kingdom

Your information is not processed outside of the United Kingdom.

Your rights

You have the following rights in relation to your personal information:

the right to be informed – you have right to know about the collection and use of your personal data. We will inform you through our service-specific notices
the right of access – you can request to know what information we hold on you along with an explanation for how it is used by making a “Subject Access Request”
the right to rectification – you have the right to ask us to update, amend or change your information if it is factually inaccurate or incomplete
the right to erasure – you have the right to ask us to delete your personal information where it can be shown that we no longer have a lawful basis to retain it or the information was collected on the basis of consent only and you have withdrawn your consent

How to get advice or make a complaint

Data Protection Officer

If you have a concern about how we collect or use your personal data you can contact the Council’s Data Protection Officer.

How to make a complaint

We aim to resolve all complaints about how we handle personal information. You also have the right to make a complaint about data protection to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Contact them by post: Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF or phone 0303 1231 113.

You can also make a complaint or find out more information on the Commissioner's Office website.

If your complaint is not about data protection, find details on how to make a complaint about a council service.