Surveys - General Privacy Notice

The full details of who we are can be found in our Overarching Privacy Notice, this is a surveys specific privacy notice. Waverley Borough Council as a local authority is responsible for service delivery and carries out a variety of surveys to gauge your views, seek your input or feedback to help us improve the quality of delivered to your services. 

Potential use

The information we collect will be used: 

• to establish residents’ views in general about living in the Borough 

• to undertake public consultation  

• to provide information to shape strategy – such as our participatory budgeting exercise 

• to inform activities linked to funding bids 

• to provide information to shape or support policy/practice, service development and improve performance improvement of service provision  

• to let us understand how the council is performing 

• to establish feedback on our service and determine levels of satisfaction, and sources of dissatisfaction with council services - such as customer satisfaction or mystery shopper surveys 

• to establish how well we keep residents informed about the council 

• to establish residents’ experience when contacting the council 

Survey Branding

Our surveys will always be branded, with the Council’s logo and participation is entirely voluntary, as we are reliant on your agreement for us to process the information. 

Most of the activities preformed by the local authority are covered under a legal basis of performing our statutory duty, however participation in any survey or market research will require your consent. 

Anonymous Surveys

If you voluntarily take part in one of our anonymous surveys or a questionnaire  we will accept this act as your consent to process your responses for the purpose stipulated at the beginning of a survey in a privacy statement. 

Consent as a basis for personal data collection

Where a survey will also involve collection of personal data, we will specify the exact data type we will be collecting and processing and advise when and how we will dispose of your data. For this purpose we will include a dedicated consent ‘tick box’ for you to mark your agreement to the terms of collection and processing. 

In relation to any special category data, our lawful basis for collection is Article 9(2)(a) where we need to seek your explicit consent. In such cases a standalone ‘tick box’ for this type of extremely sensitive data will be included and our privacy statement will explain how this data will be processes, protected and disposed of. We may need this type of data for Equality and Diversity Monitoring to ensure our compliance with Equality Act 2018 and will often remove the link to the responses and only analyse the aggregated responses. 

Withdrawal of consent

If you have provided identity or contact data as part of the survey process, you can withdraw your consent at any time, without any impact on the services we provide to you, by emailing dpo@waverley.gov.uk, however if your response or quotation has been used as part of already printed or published documentation we reserve the right to keep and use your data until these materials are out of circulation, due to potentially disproportionately high cost for us to reissue them without your data.

We will not share your data with any other parties without making you aware of it. In most cases when data sharing takes place, it is due to a contractor or a consultant performing a task on our behalf, and they are bound by a  contract or specific data sharing agreement with us.

This may be a case when another company conducts a survey with our residents or businesses, and collects and processes your data on our behalf for a specific reason and are contractually bound to dispose of it as per agreed terms.   

At the beginning of each survey we will specify how long we are planning to retain the information we collect, and this period can vary depending on the purpose of the survey.  

Where personal data was collected as part of the survey exercise, this information will be split out from the results or anonymised during the results analysis process.

We use data aggregation when presenting the results to make sure that no individuals can be identified from the provided responses.  

Right to access

The Data Protection Act 2018 allows you to find out what information is held about you, on paper and computer records. This is known as ‘right of subject access’ and applies to your person records.

• Right to request rectification

• Right to withdraw consent

• Right to erasure (right to be forgotten)

• Right to lodge a complaint

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). Report a concern on the ICO website.

You can make a Subject Access Request (SAR) online. You are entitled to receive a copy of your records free of charge, usually within a month.