Business rates privacy notice

This privacy notices sits beneath the Council’s top level privacy notice and provides information about how personal data is used by Hackney’s business rates (non-domestic rates) services:

  • business rates
  • business rates discounts and exemptions

Please see the main privacy notice for details on your rights and who to contact about use of personal data.

 

Why do we collect data?

We need your information to process your business rates account and payments, and to apply any discounts and exemptions correctly.

The information we collect is to fulfil our statutory duties under the Local Government finance Act 1988.

Any ‘special category’ data (such as health and disability) will be processed as part of our obligation to meet social protection laws.

What data do we collect?

Your personal or company contact details will be required to process your business rates account and payments.

We require bank details be provided if your non domestic rate is collected by direct debit.

To obtain discounts or exemptions, you may also be required to provide sensitive information including income.

See who’s eligible for discounts or exemptions. We will require proof in support of any application for a discount or exemption.

Where we share your data

There are legal restrictions on how business rate information is shared and processed, and we as a council adhere to these. Places we may share your data include:

  • in the event that there are arrears for which we have issued a summons we will share relevant information with the magistrates court
  • in the event that there are arrears for which we have obtained a liability order, we may engage a debt recovery firm to retrieve these and share relevant information with them for this purpose
  • we may use an external printing firm to produce paper statements and any mass-mailed correspondence letters
  • we use basic contact information on business rates as part of our business index, a system that acts as a central record for businesses receiving council services

There are some laws that specifically state that business rates data may be used within the Council for another purpose to fulfil another one of the tasks under our official authority.

If this is the case, we will include this on the relevant privacy notice for the service that is using it.

How long we keep your data for

Please see our main privacy notice for more information on retention schedules.

Your rights

Please see our main privacy notice for more details on your right:

  • to be informed
  • to access your personal data
  • to rectify your personal data if it is incorrect
  • to restrict our processing of your personal data

If you do find that the information we hold on you is incorrect, you should inform us as soon as possible to update our records.

Page updated on: 3 August 2022