Employee privacy policy

How we manage employees and potential employees' information for recruitment and working for the Council.

On this page:

Why we need your personal information

We need your personal information for:

your employment or prospective employment with the Council
us to meet our obligations to you as an employer or prospective employer.

Processing your personal information is necessary for recruitment or to set up a contract with you. If you do not provide us with the information we need, we will not be able to manage our employment relationship with you.

Some information also needs to be shared with other organisations because the Council is under a legal obligation to do so.

The information we need to collect and what it's used for

We need your personal details to identify you and communicate with you when necessary, including your:

name
national insurance number (NI)
contact details, including your home address, telephone numbers and email addresses.

We will need information to check your eligibility to work in the United Kingdom.

We will need your personal banking details to process all payments due to you in your employment with the Council.

We may need your employment history, qualifications, training certification and licenses, like a driving license, to:

validate you are qualified for your role
calculate any allowances or statutory payments you are entitled to in your employment.

We may need to do disclosure and background checks or ask our Processors to do this for us to assess your suitability for specific roles.

We may need information to check you qualify for specific types of leave. You may need to provide us with additional information, such as dates of confinement for maternity, adoption, shared parental leave and paternity support leave, to make sure you meet the qualifying criteria and receive the right leave and payments.

We may need information about your health for recruitment, supporting attendance arrangements or for statutory health surveillance programmes and health assessments so we can:

support our employees' health and wellbeing
manage attendance across the organisation
comply with our statutory responsibilities to our employees.

During your employment, we may ask you to disclose personal characteristic information as defined in the equality act 2010 . This information is for equalities purposes and statistical analysis of our workforce.

If you are involved in a process like supporting attendance, discipline and appeals, grievance, bullying and harassment complaints or accident investigations, you may need to disclose personal information as evidence for the decision-making process of the case. The outcomes of the process will be communicated to you, recorded on file, and held for the relevant retention timescale [1MB] .

If the process is in relation to an accident investigation, the information may be forwarded to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) as part of our legal requirements on reporting accidents.

Other data we may need to collect

During your employment, we may also collect data about your use of council premises, equipment, work laptops or work phones, including:

telephone numbers you have called and the date, time, and duration of incoming and outgoing calls
websites you have visited, including the date and times you visited the website
emails you have sent and received, including dates, times, subject, sender and recipient
details of media files stored on our network
use of unencrypted USB devices
clock in and out times on time recording equipment
system login times
entry and exit of automated door systems
CCTV footage

This information may be used for surveillance purposes, investigating, and managing conduct and for data matching exercises.

Disclosure and background checks

We may need to do disclosure, Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) or Violent and Sex Offender Register (ViSOR) checks for some posts.
In these cases, the council or its Processors will process information about criminal convictions or police intelligence about suspected criminality to assess your suitability for the post in question.

Some members of staff may also use Renfrewshire Council services. We process information on service users, including service users who are members of staff, in accordance our main privacy policy.

Who we share your information with

We are legally obliged to safeguard public funds and prevent fraud, so we need to share certain data with other public bodies such as HMRC, where the law requires this.

We also generally comply with requests for specific information from other regulatory and law enforcement bodies where this is necessary and proportionate.

This is in accordance with our Information Use and Privacy Policy , our privacy policy, and our records management plan [1MB] .

In some circumstances it will be necessary to share information externally or make it or make available to external organisations.

For duties or requirements of your role

We may need to make information available if:

you are required, as part of your duties, to attend or speak at council committees or subcommittees. If these meetings are broadcast online, the recording or images of the meeting, including the attendance or contribution of officers attending, will be published on our website.
you are the author of a committee report or named as the contact point in that report. Your name, service, and work telephone number will be published on the committee report on the council website.
you need to be registered with employment bodies such at the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) or General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS)
you are taking workplace assessments, getting results, or gaining job-related qualifications with qualifications authorities like the Scottish Qualifications Authority or City and Guilds.

For legal matters and insurance purposes

We may need to share:

information in relation to an accident at work with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE)
personal details with our insurance providers for insurance policies, including the Employers Liability Insurance or Indemnification of Employees
information about your employment relationship with the courts or with legal representatives if you enter a dispute in court or an employment tribunal either during or after to your employment with us.

For financial and pay related purposes

We will share essential payroll information and data with external organisations to:

make pension benefit calculations and contributions if you are a member of the local government pension scheme
make payroll deductions or salary sacrifice contributions, such as charitable giving, additional voluntary (AVC) contributions towards your pension, trade union subscriptions, credit union contributions or payments toward court orders
investigate fraud or possible fraud to Audit Scotland as part of the National Fraud Initiative.

Occupational health and counselling records

Your records are confidential and are not disclosed to the Council. We may need to share or transfer your records if:

it informs a health report from our occupational health provider
you have agreed to engage with our counselling service because of a management-initiated referral
we move to a new occupational health provider.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests about employees

The Council is subject to freedom of information (FOI) legislation, and we often receive requests which ask for disclosure of information about members of staff.

We assess these requests carefully, and we will only release staff information if doing so complies with our obligations under data protection law.

We will not voluntarily release non-work-related information about employees, such as a home address. We also won't voluntarily release information about an employee as a service user rather than an employee of the Council.

We will also seek the views of the employee or employees about these requests first.

More information about Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

How long we keep your information for

The council maintains a records retention and disposal schedule [1MB] which sets out how long we hold different types of information for.

Your rights under data protection law

You have a right to:

access to your information - you have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you.
have your information corrected - we want to make sure that your personal information is accurate, complete, and up to date. You can ask us to correct any personal information about you that you believe is not accurate.
have your information deleted - you have the right to ask us to delete personal information about you if:
- you think we no longer need the information for the purposes for which it was originally intended
- you have validly objected to our use of your personal information - see Objecting to how we may use your information below.
- our use of your personal information is not legal or not for our other legal obligations.
ask us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes.

Restricted use of your information

You may ask us to restrict how we use your personal information.

This can apply if we need to:

check the accuracy of personal information that we hold about you
assess the validity of an objection you have made about the use of your information.

You may also ask us to restrict the use of your personal information if we no longer have a basis for using it, but you don't want it to be deleted. In this case, we may only use the relevant personal information with your consent for legal claims or where it is in the public interest to do so.

Corrections or complaints

You can contact us on 0300 300 0300 or email the Council's Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@renfrewshire.gov.uk if you want us to correct, delete or restrict your personal data.

If you are unhappy with the way we process your personal data you have the right to complain.