At Citizens Advice Plymouth, we collect and use your personal information to help solve your problems, improve our services and tackle wider issues in society that affect people’s lives.

We only ask for the information we need. We always let you decide what you’re comfortable telling us, explain why we need it and treat it as confidential.

When we record and use your personal information we:

• only access it when we have a good reason
• only share what is necessary and relevant
• don’t sell it to anyone

We handle and store your personal information in line with the law – including the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018. You can check our main Citizens Advice policy for how we handle most of your personal information.

How we use your data for advice

This section covers how we use your data to provide you with advice.

For general advice and nationally funded advice programmes please see the national Citizens Advice privacy notice.

How Citizens Advice Plymouth collect your information

This will depend on which service you are accessing; for national services please see the national Citizens Advice privacy notice. If you contact our service directly, we will ask you for information about yourself in order to provide you with tailored advice.

If you have been referred to our Utilities services by your energy provider, with your permission we will access your account information so that we can effectively advise you. All other information would be provided by you directly during your contact with us.

If you have been referred to our Local services by another organisation, they will provide some information to us about you and your enquiry with your permission. We have data sharing agreements in place with our partners to ensure this is done securely. All other information would be provided by you directly during your contact with us.

What information we collect

We’ll only ask for information that’s relevant to your problem. Depending on what you want help with, this might include:

• your name and contact details – so we can keep in touch with you about your case
• personal information – for example about family, work, or financial circumstances, or if you’re vulnerable or at risk of harm
• details about services you get that are causing you problems – like energy or post
• details of items or services you’ve bought and traders you’ve dealt with
• information like your gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation

We occasionally ask for details about someone else like a neighbour or your partner so we can deal with an enquiry. We’ll only do this if we have a legitimate interest in the information, or we need it to protect someone’s life.

If you don’t want to give us certain information, you don’t have to. For example, if you want to stay anonymous, we’ll only record information about your problem and make sure you’re not identified.

However, we may be limited in the advice we can provide you without certain information, for instance, when advising on benefit eligibility and entitlement, we require details of any health conditions or disabilities.

What we use your information for

The main reason we ask for your information is to help solve your problem. We only access your information for other reasons if we really need to – for example:

• for training and quality purposes
• to investigate complaints
• to get feedback from you about our services
• to help us improve our services

If you have any questions about how your information is collected or used, you can contact Citizens Advice Plymouth on DPA@citizensadviceplymouth.org.uk

You can read more detailed information about how some of our services use information on our national site.

Working on your behalf

When you give us authority to act on your behalf we may need to share information with relevant third party organisations. For example, when helping you with council tax issues we may need to share information with Plymouth City Council, or when helping you with issues regarding your benefits we may need to share information with the DWP or our partner organisation Improving Lives Plymouth.

We only share information with relevant organisations if we have received your permission to do so.

How Citizens Advice Plymouth store your information

The national Citizens Advice charity and your local Citizens Advice operate a system called Casebook to keep your personal information safe. This means they’re a ‘joint data controller’ for your personal information that’s stored in our Casebook system.

Each local Citizens Advice is an independent charity, and a member of the national Citizens Advice charity. The Citizens Advice membership agreement also requires that the use of your information complies with data protection law.

You can find out more about your data rights on the Information Commissioner’s website.

In addition Citizens Advice Plymouth uses Microsoft 365 as its productivity suite. When using the Self Referral form our website, our policy is to minimize all data collected and we aim to transfer all personal information to Casebook during the course of your case.