Privacy Policy

​Introduction

Here at County Care, we are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This statement is written in accordance with the Data Protection Act and GDPR regulations and outlines the way in which we gather and use information relating to you, the user of this website.

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Please read this privacy and cookies policy carefully as it contains important information on who we are, how and why we collect, store, use and share personal information, your rights in relation to your personal information and on how to contact us and supervisory authorities in the event you have a complaint.

We reserve the rights to change this policy from time to time at our own discretion and this document should therefore be regularly referred to for updates and variations. Any changes to the privacy policy will appear on this page.

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Who we are and how to contacts us

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act, the data controller and operator of this website is:

County Care Independent Living Limited of Unit 17A Solent House, Lansbury Estate, 102 Lower Guildford Road, Knaphill, Woking, Surrey GU21 2EP.

ICO Registration Number ZA146833

Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted at the above address or at dataprotectionofficer@countycare.co.uk 

County Care is comprised of several projects which run across the organisation and which all share the same data protection procedures to ensure consistent and complaint processing and control of data.

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What kind of information is being collected?

We operate several services that require the supply of personal information. Personal information about individuals is usually provided to County Care by the individual (adult, young person, their parent or guardian, customer or visitor). Personal information that individuals provided to other organisations may also be forwarded to County Care (for example, by a social worker at a local authority when placing an individual with us).

County Care may collect and process the following personal information:

• Personal details (name, date of birth, email address, home address, telephone number, national identifiers (such as National Insurance Number or passport number or unique pupil number), gender, disability, sexual orientation, biometrics, criminal convictions, racial or ethnic origin, religious or other beliefs)

• Family details (contact details and relationships)

• Financial information (bank details)

• Information about your employment

• Details of any contact we have had with you, such as complaints or incidents

• Safeguarding, special educational needs, physical and mental health

• Education details (school admission, attendance, absences, behaviour, exclusions,

• Certificates, exams or tests records and progress)

• Visual images, personal appearance and behaviour (photographs, CCTV recordings)

• Information relating to offences or alleged offences 

• Details of goods and services provided

• Details of transactions you carry out through this website and of the fulfilment of your orders; and details of your visits to this website including, but not limited to, traffic data, location data, weblogs and other communication data, whether this is required for our own billing purposes or otherwise and the resources that you access.

 

If you contact County Care, we may keep a record of that correspondence, details of any visits to County Care’s hubs, and the resources that you access.

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Uses of your personal information collected

We may use the information held about you in the following ways:

• Provide education and training

• Provide residential healthcare, welfare and educational support services

• Maintain our own accounts and records

• Administer the booking onto and organisation of associations and events

• Support and manage our staff

• Advertising and marketing

• Provide information you requested

• Review and process your job application

• Legitimate business needs

• Ensuring content from this website is presented to you in an effective manner

• Provide our services and products

• Carry out our legal obligations

• Carry out obligations arising from contracts with you

• Managing your care plan

• Notifying you of changes to our services

 

In some cases, we collect information about your that is not personally identifiable such as type of internet browser you are using, type of operating system you are using and other technical or usage related data.

 

This website is not intended for use by children and we do not knowingly collect or use personal information relating to children.

We will not rent or sell your information to third parties.

 

Disclosure of your information

In fulfilling our business and legal requirements, we may share your information with third parties including but not limited to the following:

• Family and representatives of the person whose personal data we are processing

• Ofsted, Department for Education, NHS and local authorities

• Care Quality Commission (England) 

• Police, courts, tribunals and security organisations

• Contractors who we pay to provide services

• Healthcare professionals, social and welfare organisations

• Staff, students, governors and school board

• Debt collection and tracing agencies

• Financial organisations

• Education, training and examining bodies

• Other members of County Care

 

We will not transfer your personal data outside of the EEA or to any organisation (or subordinate bodies) governed by public international law or which is set up under any agreement between two or more countries.

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Securing your data

County Care is committed to ensuring that your personal information is kept secure. We have appropriate security measures and procedures in place to secure and store your personal information. We limit access to your personal information to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to this website; any transmission is at your own risk.

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We will only retain your personal information for as long as it is required in relation to the purposes for which it was originally obtained or based on our legal and regulatory requirements.

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IP addresses and cookies

County Care may collect information about your computer, including where available, your IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration. We may also obtain information about your general internet usage by using a cookie file which is stored on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer's hard drive. They help us to improve our website and to deliver a better and more personalised service. You may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies. However, if you select this setting, you may be unable to access certain parts of our website. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you log on to our website.

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We use cookies for a number of reasons on our website:

Essential Cookies:  Cookies that are essential to the running of our website, in that the website will not function correctly without them. These are enabled by default and cannot be turned off, unless you change the cookie settings in your browser.

Analytics cookies: For example, when someone visits our website, We make use of the Google Analytics service to collect standard information about visitors to the sites and their behaviour (e.g., what pages they viewed). The data provided by Google Analytics is anonymised and in no way enables Us to identify individual visitors, however, Google Analytics will place a cookie on your device to enable the service. For more information about how Google Analytics cookies work on websites visit: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage.

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Marketing cookies: These cookies are used for the purposes of measuring the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns and to also serve our advertising via Google’s advertising networks. We use these tracking technologies to help us run our business. We use cookies and tracking pixels for Google, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

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Access to information

The Data Protection Act and GDPR regulations gives you the right to access information held about you. Your right of access can be exercised in accordance with the Data Protection Act.

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Your rights

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• Request information about whether we hold personal information about you, and, if so, what that information is and why we are holding/using it.

• Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a "data subject access request"). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.

• Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.

• Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).

• Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes.

• Object to automated decision-making including profiling, that is not to be subject of any automated decision-making by us using your personal information or profiling of you.

• Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.

• Request transfer of your personal information in an electronic and structured form to you or to another party (commonly known as a right to “data portability”). This enables you to take your data from us in an electronically useable format and to be able to transfer your data to another party in an electronically useable format.

• Withdraw consent. In those circumstances where you may have provided your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so in law.

 

If you want to exercise any of the rights above, please contact us (please see the ‘Who we are’ section for contact details). We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it.

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Complaints

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would, however, like to have the opportunity to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.