Information

As your landlord, we have to provide you with information about:

• your rights and responsibilities as a tenant
• our services
• our policies and ways of doing things
• our activities and performance as a landlord.

We provide this information in:

• the series of tenant handbook booklets
• tenant newsletters
• annual performance reports
• leaflets.

Confidentiality

We respect your right to privacy, so we have strict rules about:

• the information we keep about your household
• the times we use it or pass it on.

We only keep information about you and your household that we need to do our job as your landlord.
We use this information ourselves and sometimes pass some of it to people working on our behalf, such as our repairs contractors. We also supply statistics to bodies like the Housing Corporation, without identifying individual tenants.

If another organisation, such as the local authority Housing Benefits section, social services or the police asks us for information, we always make sure exactly why they want the information, before deciding whether to pass it on. In most cases, we will ask your permission first.

However, in some circumstances, we have to supply information by law. For example, we have to tell the Council Tax section of the local authority who is living in our homes. And we are expected to tell the authorities if we think you may be committing benefit fraud.

Access to our files

You have the right, under the Data Protection Act, to see the information we hold about you in our files and on computer.

To see your file, phone your neighbourhood officer to arrange a time to come into our offices. They will give you a file with all the information you have a right to see and allow you to make photocopies to take away. We will charge you a fee for this service.

You can ask us to change or remove information we hold on you, but we will need proof that the information is wrong. If you are not happy with any of our decisions, you can make a complaint.

For more details on how to access your file, please see the 'our resident files and how to access yours' leaflet.