Building Control Privacy Policy

Why are we collecting your data?

Babergh and Mid Suffolk District Councils are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This notice is provided to clarify what information the councils need to collect, store and process when you contact the Building Control team.

For the purposes of data protection, Babergh and Mid Suffolk District Councils are the data controller for the personal information you provide. All personal information is held and processed by Babergh and Mid Suffolk District Councils in accordance with Data Protection legislation.

Categories of personal data

The councils will process some or all of the following personal data where necessary to perform its tasks:

  • Names, titles
  • Contact details such as telephone numbers, addresses and email addresses.
  • Other relevant information such as ownership of the land

Purpose for processing

If you are undertaking construction work, building regulations require that the work is checked and inspected by a building control body to ensure the development is constructed safely. The information that you provide will be used to determine your building regulations application and to contact you in relation to this to arrange inspection of the site during construction. Site inspections will also be undertaken if any breach of building regulations is reported.

Lawful basis for processing personal data

The lawful bases for processing your personal data are as follows:

  • Compliance with legal obligations – we are required to keep a record of applicants and proposals for the purposes of building regulations under the following legislation:
    • The Building Act 1984
    • The Building Regulations 2010

Providing accurate information

It is important that we hold accurate and up to date information about you in order to assess your needs and deliver appropriate services. If any of your details change please tell us as soon as possible so that we can update your records.

We will not make any decisions about you based on automated processing or send/store your data abroad.

Sharing information

We may be required to share your personal information with other departments within the Council, consultants contracted by us, other local authorities, utility companies, fire safety bodies and the courts. We will check some of the information with other sources to ensure the information you have provided is accurate.

Prescribed information will be entered onto statutory registers which are managed in accordance with the relevant framework; this includes making the information publicly available.

We will not disclose any information to other organisations unless we have a legal duty to release information for the purposes of preventing and detecting fraud or crime.

Data retention

The councils will only retain your data for as long as necessary. Personal Information provided to us will be kept for a period of up to 15 years after completion of your project and you have received your certificate of completion. After this time, your information will be disposed of. Full details of how long the Council retains information for can be found in our retention policy published on our website.

Your rights

For further details on how we maintain the security of your information, your rights to access the information we hold on you, including correcting or removing your information, please refer to the Privacy page on our website. Alternatively you can phone our Data Protection Officer: 0300 1234000

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) if you are unhappy with the way in which we have processed your personal information.