Who are we?

Community Connections Lewisham is a service run by the charity Age UK Lewisham & Southwark and is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy and security. Whenever you provide us with your personal information via our phoneline or our website, we will treat that information in accordance with this policy, our terms and conditions and current UK Data Protection legislation.

Age UK Lewisham and Southwark is a registered charity (number 296862) and company limited by guarantee (number 2118525). The registered address is Stones End Day Centre, 11 Scovell Road, London, SE1 1QQ

What type of information is collected about you?

Any service user who contacts the CCL helpline directly for support will be asked to confirm their gender, ethnicity and age range. Refusing to give this information will not, however, prevent you from receiving over the phone support from our service. We will also ask if you are happy for us to create a record for you on our database, storing the following information: your name, address and postcode, telephone number, email address, date of birth, gender, GP surgery and accommodation type. If you do not consent to this then we will still be happy to support you over the phone and will log your call as an anonymous contact.

If you have been referred to our service by someone else, such as another professional or a family member, then we will store details about you that have been given to us by the referrer (either through our website referral form or over the phone). This is done on the understanding that the referrer has been given your direct consent before passing on your details to us. We will always ask the referrer to confirm that your consent has been given, through a tick box on our website referral form or by asking them to confirm directly over the phone.

Why do we collect and store this personal information about our service users?

(1) To help our service users

We ask for this data in order to make the process of using our service as easy and effective as possible for you. Collecting this personal information ensures that:

  • Any member of our staff team you are in touch with will be able to look you up on our database to see what previous support has been given (e.g. referrals made and by whom), therefore helping them to give you relevant and high quality support
  • We are able to contact you when appropriate e.g. if you have asked us to post or email information to you or phone you back with some information
  • You will not need to be asked again for personal information every time you phone us
  • The support we offer you is relevant-for example, asking your age allows us to know whether or not you are eligible for a particular service (e.g. a 60+ service)
  • We have sufficient information to investigate any complaint you might have about our service, and that staff are accountable for the work they have done with service users. 

(2) To help improve our service and support our partners

Collecting client data enables us to:

  • Demonstrate the need for existing or prospective services
  • Use anonymised data in our future funding bids and to advocate on behalf of our clients to local authorities and partners
  • Present statistics on our performance and meet reporting requirements for our funders
  • Review and improve the current services we provide in terms of how well they reflect the needs of the borough

Who has access to your personal information?

Our entire staff team have access to the Charity Log database on which your details are stored. Age UK Lewisham and Southwark maintains a strict policy that staff members are only permitted to access client data for clients that they themselves are supporting.  We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes, nor will we sell or rent your information to any third parties. If our support for you involves referring you to another professional organisation then this will require us to pass on relevant details, such as your contact details, to that third party. However, we will only ever do this after first gaining your express verbal or written consent.

The only circumstance in which our staff would share your information to a third party without requiring your consent is when you are at serious risk of harm, or causing serious harm to others, and/or if there is reason to believe a crime has been or could be committed. Under the GDPR Act of 2018 our staff have a legal duty to disclose information in these circumstances, even without a client’s consent. Our staff would nonetheless have a duty to inform you of their need and intent to disclose information to the Police and/or Social Services.  

Lawful Processing

The GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 requires us to rely on one or more lawful grounds to process your personal information. The following are the grounds we use: consent, legitimate interest, contractual necessity, legal obligation.

Your rights

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) provides the following rights for individuals, which our organisation provides to you:

The right to be informed–we will tell you when we are storing your information, and let you know what it is that we are recording. We will also provide you information as to why we need it, and what we will do with it. 

The right of access-you have the right to request to see what information we hold about you, free of charge and within 30 days. If you would like to do this, please contact the Age UK Lewisham & Southwark CEO Ross Diamond on information@ageuklands.org.uk or by post to Stones End Day Centre, 11 Scovell Road, London, SE1 1QQ

The right to rectification–if your information is incorrect or out of date, you have the right to ask us to correct or update it. Please contact us in writing via the means above to do so

The right to erasure–you have the right to ask for your information to be deleted. Please contact us in writing via the means above to do so

The right to restrict processing–you have the right to tell us we can store your information but not use it. Please contact us in writing via the means above to do so

The right to data portability–you have the right to ask us to transfer the information we hold on you to another organisation. Please contact us in writing via the means above to do so.

The right to object–if our lawful basis for processing your information is legitimate interest, you have the right to object to our doing so. Please contact us in writing via the means above to do so