Legal services provide legal advice and guidance for the council.
Our in-house legal department offers expert advice on a range of council responsibilities and public sector duties. We're committed to client care and we provide high quality, responsive advice to meet the needs of internal and external clients.
We provide specialist customer-focused advice on a range of areas of law, including:
Legal Services offers an in-house service to all officers and councillors across the Council. This is provided in partnership with the legal teams of East Sussex County Council and West Sussex County Council, who together with this Council’s legal team have formed Orbis Public Law.
We're also available for instruction by other public bodies. Our current external clients include the East Sussex Fire Authority, district councils, local authorities and other local public services.
Director of Governance and Law and acting Monitoring Officer.
To contact Elizabeth, send an email to elizabeth.culbert@brighton-hove.gov.uk.
Head of Legal - Litigation and Safeguarding.
To contact Natasha, send an email to Natasha.Watson@brighton-hove.gov.uk.
Head of Legal - Commercial.
To contact Siobhan, send an email to Siobhan.Fry@brighton-hove.gov.uk.
Data protection Officer.
Brighton & Hove City Council share a joint Data protection Officer with some of its neighbouring authorities. You can contact the data protection officer.
Senior Lawyer - Corporate Law and Data Protection Lead for Legal Services.
To contact Victoria, send an email to victoria.simpson@brighton-hove.gov.uk.
Brighton & Hove City Council is a data controller. The Council processes all personal data in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018 (‘the data protection legislation’).
This privacy notice explains how the Legal Services team retains and processes data. Different services across the Council have their own privacy notices which will apply to the processing of your data, depending on the Council services you use. For example, if your query relates to Housing, the Housing Service privacy notice will apply to the processing of your data.
Some of the information which the public (or Legal Services’ external clients) provides to the Council is passed to Legal Services so that we can provide legal advice and representation. That is the purpose for which we hold your data. Without it, we would not be able to provide legal services.
We may process different types of your data, including personal data, special category data and criminal offence data. What these mean is explained below:
We only process your data in accordance with the principles of data protection legislation and to the extent necessary to deliver legal services. We'll ensure that we have the appropriate lawful justification (or ‘lawful bases’) under the UK GDPR and DPA 2018 before processing your personal information.
We rely on one or more of the following reasons, or lawful bases, to process your personal data to:
We rely on the lawful bases above together with one or more of these additional reasons, or lawful bases, to process special category data, processing is:
We will only process data relating to criminal offences and convictions where there are lawful bases for the processing as above, and in addition the processing is either under the control of official authority or is authorised by law.
Generally, the information we hold will have been provided to us by you, by Council staff or by our external clients. However, we may also hold information provided by third parties where this is relevant and necessary for the provision of our legal service for example social workers, health professionals, doctors, occupational therapists and enforcement and regulatory agencies such as the police.
Access to the personal information we hold about you is restricted to other parties on a need to know basis. We treat your personal information lawfully, fairly and transparently, and ensure that it is:
Where we need to share information about you, we do so under data-sharing arrangements which comply with data protection legislation. We may share legal work with other local authority legal teams, including those which together with Brighton and Hove City Council form Orbis Public Law. This allows them to provide legal advice instead of us. We do so only under strict data sharing arrangements which safeguard your data in compliance with data sharing legislation.
We may also be required to share your information with our regulators who are permitted access to this information by law, and/or with other organisations where we have a legal obligation to share the information with them. This may include our insurers or external auditors.
Where we're required to share data including data relating to criminal convictions with the police, we have procedures to ensure this is carried out in a secure and confidential manner, with each incident of sharing reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
Finally, where we need to instruct external lawyers or experts, or where we use external software or systems to deliver our service, we will do so securely ensuring that the other party is contractually required to adhere
to the security requirements imposed by data protection legislation. They will only be able to use your information to the extent that they need to do so to complete work on our behalf.
We store all the personal data we process in accordance with file retention and destruction arrangements. We will dispose of all personal data securely once there is no longer a lawful basis for retaining it. How long we retain personal data depends on the type of data, the reason it is processed and what the law says. Information on the retention periods applicable to the category of personal data your data falls within, is available from Legal Services on request.
The Council has put in place robust security measures to ensure that all personal data is retained securely. Further information regarding that is available from data.protection@brighton-hove.gov.uk.
Under data protection legislation, you have the right to:
Please visit Data Subject Rights for details of how to access your information rights. If you have any additional queries then please send an email to Legal.services@brighton-hove.gov.uk.
If you have a concern about how we collect or use your personal data you can contact the Council’s Data Protection Officer.
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.