This document is for people who are referred to Two Step, our homeless services programme. The aim of this document is to provide you with all the information you need to understand how HOPE worldwide UK handles your personal information so that you can feel comfortable sharing it with us.
See below for more information about how we use your personal information and your rights – ask a member of staff or email privacy@hopeworldwide.org.uk if you have any questions.
In this document “we” and “our” refers to HOPE worldwide UK, whose registered office is at 360 City Road, London, EC1V 2PY.
The main reason why we collect personal information about you is so that we can provide appropriate advice and support to help you find suitable housing, e.g. by offering you viewings for a suitable property or referring you to an appropriate housing provider.
We also use information about you for other reasons, which include:
Your information may also be used to help monitor the quality of the services we provide. This will help us better understand the needs of the people we see, which helps us improve and develop our services. If used in this way, any information that can identify you will be removed.
We get the information from the organisation that referred you to our service or from you directly.
It depends on your situation and what we can offer you. At different times we may record and use any of the following to help us support you to improve your housing situation:
We also may collect and use the following special categories of your personal information:
You do not have to give us the information we ask for, but this may mean that we give you the wrong advice or limit what we can do for you.
Your information is confidential. We will only ever share information about you with others when it is necessary, on a need-to-know basis.
If we wish to share any information with other organisations, we will be specific as to what information is being shared, with whom and for what purpose so you can make an informed decision. For example, we may ask you if we can give a letting agent or landlord your name and phone number so that they can contact you regarding viewing a particular property. We may also ask you if you would like us to make an application to a housing provider or grant provider on your behalf. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
Where it’s necessary, we may share information about you without your consent. The most common situations where this happens are:
In future, we may also need to share personal data with other legal entities, on a temporary or permanent basis, for the purposes of a collaboration, reorganisation, change of legal form, dissolution or similar event.
In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data so that you can’t be identified, in which case we may use and share such data without further notice to you.
We will only use your personal information when we are satisfied that it is fair, and we can do so lawfully. Our lawful bases for processing personal information may sometimes overlap and there may be several grounds which justify how we use it. The lawful bases are as follows:
We have a legitimate interest, for example:
There is a substantial public interest (for example: when we provide confidential advice or support to you; to monitor equality of treatment; to safeguard adults and children at risk, or where we need to share data for the purposes of detecting and preventing unlawful acts)
We will typically ask for your consent to pass your information to other organisations, except for the circumstances described in the previous section. We will always ask for your consent if we would like to use information about you for publicity or fundraising purposes.
Less commonly, we may use your personal data where we need to protect your vital interests, where we have a legal obligation (for example when we are required to do so by a court) or in relation to legal claims.
Your personal details, as well as the record of your attendance and any support you have received from us will be held securely on our case management system (In-Form) for 7 years from the last time we had contact with you, in case you need our support again. We also need it to monitor our work, comply with audits, produce statistics about homelessness, as well as to defend any legal claims.
We use third-party IT solutions, Microsoft Office 365 and In-Form (Salesforce) to record and store our clients’ personal data. Internal documents and information generated by us are stored in cloud services hosted within the UK or European Economic Area (EEA).
We also use an online referral form hosted by a US data processor called “FormAssembly” so that organisations can refer people to our service in a secure form without using email. This data is stored in the United States, which does not have equivalent data protection laws. However, FormAssembly’s robust Information Security procedures and policies are designed to meet the requirements of the GDPR and we have contractual mechanisms in place to ensure data is protected. See Security for Data Collection and Forms | FormAssembly for more information.
Under some circumstances, by law you have the right to:
If you want to do any of the above, please contact a member of HOPE worldwide UK staff or email privacy@hopeworldwide.org.uk.
If you gave us consent to share your information and you are no longer happy with your decision, you can withdraw your consent at any time. To do it, please contact a member of staff or e-mail privacy@hopeworldwide.org.uk and we will stop sharing it.
You can also make complaint at any time to the Data Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.
