Family Group Conference Service

In order to comply with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), where personal data relating to a data subject is collected, Lancashire County Council would like to provide you with the following details.

Identity and contact details of the data controller

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Contact details of the data protection officer

Our Data Protection Officer is Paul Bond. You can contact him at dpo@lancashire.gov.uk or Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ

Purposes for processing

We work with families when they are facing difficult situations or decisions to ensure the well-being and care of children and young people. We provide families with an opportunity to come together and make safe, reasonable and sensible plans for the children.

A professional such as a social worker or key worker can refer a family for a family group conference when they have concerns about a child's welfare. A person with parental responsibility must to agree to the referral before the family works with us.

For full details of how the service operates please see it's website here,

https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/children-education-families/keeping-children-safe/family-group-conferences/#contact

Category of personal data being processed

Personal data (information relating to a living, identifiable individual)
Special category personal data (racial, ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation)

Legal basis for processing personal data

The legal basis for processing your personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(e) Public Task: the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law. You must reference the applicable task/function and its' basis in law if you wish to rely on this basis for processing.

Lancashire County Council relies on UK GDPR Article 6 (1) (e) Public Task by virtue of the following legislation:

Under Sections 10 and 11 of The Children’s Act 2004 we are required to discharge services to promote the welfare of children, and Section 23 and 25 of The Children’s and Families Act 2014, in which we are required to ensure the identification of children with special educational needs or disabilities, and to ensure the integration of those children.

Legal basis for processing special categories of personal data

The legal basis for processing your special categories of personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR is:

(h) Processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive or occupational medicine, for the assessment of the working capacity of the employee, medical diagnosis, the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services.

Lancashire County Council relies on UK GDPR Article 9 (2) (h) by virtue of the following legislation:

Recipients of the data

We do not share the specific outcomes of the Family Group Conference with anyone outside of LCC Children’s services.

The resulting plan will form part of a social care case file which would be held securely and would only ever be shared where Lancashire County Council have a clear lawful basis for doing so.

Information we share

Forename
Address
Date of birth
Gender
Ethnicity
Category of case
Reason for Social Worker referral and purpose of the FGC
Contact phone numbers of relatives or friends who would like to join focus group to develop the service

Any transfers to another country

Retention periods

Lancashire County Council will only store your information for as long as is legally required or in situations where there is no legal retention period they will follow established best practice.

File type	Description	Security	Retention period
Contact details of participants of the Family Group Conference	Details of those participating in Family Group Conferences. This includes name of individual and relationship with the family members. Sign in sheets completed at the point of attending conference.	Held securely at all times – retained by the service securely on LCC premises.	Attendees details may be recorded on the LiquidLogic social care platform. Sign in sheets are destroyed after the conference is attended.
Family Group Conference Service – Improvement Plan	Plan of action generated as a result of the Family Group Conference session	Plan retained against social care service user files – retained securely on social care platform LiquidLogic.	Retained in line with Lancashire County Council social care retention periods.

Your rights

You have certain rights under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), these are the right:

to be informed via Privacy Notices such as this.
to withdraw your consent. If we are relying on your consent to process your data then you can remove this at any point.
of access to any personal information the council holds about yourself. To request a copy of this information you must make a subject access request in writing. You are entitled to receive a copy of your personal data within 1 calendar month of our receipt of your subject access request. If your request is complex then we can extend this period by a further two months, if we need to do this we will contact you. You can request a subject access request, either via a letter or via an email to Information Governance Team, address below.
of rectification, we must correct inaccurate or incomplete data within one month.
to erasure. You have the right to have your personal data erased and to prevent processing unless we have a legal obligation to process your personal information.
to restrict processing. You have the right to suppress processing. We can retain just enough information about you to ensure that the restriction is respected in future.
to data portability. We can provide you with your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine readable form when asked.
to object. You can object to your personal data being used for profiling, direct marketing or research purposes.
in relation to automated decision making and profiling, to reduce the risk that a potentially damaging decision is taken without human intervention.

If you want to exercise any of these rights then you can do so by contacting:

Information Governance Team
Lancashire County Council
PO Box 78
County Hall
Preston
PR1 8XJ

Email: dpo@lancashire.gov.uk

To ensure that we can deal with your request as efficiently as possible you will need to include your current name and address, proof of identity (a copy of your driving licence, passport or two different utility bills that display your name and address), as much detail as possible regarding your request so that we can identify any information we may hold about you, this may include your previous name and address, date of birth and what council service you were involved with.

Further information

If you would like more information about this specific service then please contact FGCservice@lancashire.gov.uk.

For more information about how we use personal information see Lancashire County Council's full privacy notice.

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact the Information Governance team who will investigate the matter.

Lancashire County Council, PO Box 78 County Hall, Fishergate, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 8XJ or email: dataprotection@lancashire.gov.uk

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).