How we will store and process your details under the General Data Protection Regulation (Support Payment for unpaid carers).
Contents
Introduction
If you were in receipt of carers allowance on 31 March 2022, or you have made a claim for carers allowance on or before 31 March 2022 that has not yet been decided, then you may be entitled to a £500 payment.
The payment is being made in recognition of the increased financial pressures unpaid carers have experienced as a result of the pandemic, and to help with some of the additional costs they have incurred.
If you register for this payment we will need - via your local authority - to collect your personal data to verify whether you are eligible to receive the payment and, if so, to provide a payment to you.
Welsh Government will be the data controller for the personal data collected and we will process it in line with our public task and the official authority vested in us.
Your local authority will collect and check your information against data held by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to ensure you were claiming carers allowance on the eligible date, or that you have a claim for carers allowance in progress that may result in a retrospective award for the eligible date.
Although the Welsh Government is the data controller, we will not normally receive any information that identifies you, except in the event you wish to:
- make a complaint, or to
- exercise your data protection rights under the UK GDPR, or
- in the event a local authority has identified a suspicion of fraud. In this case, your local authority will provide us with a copy of your information to enable us to respond. However, the Welsh Government does intend support payment for unpaid carers data held by local authorities to be included in the next National Fraud Initiative exercise.
The Welsh Government will receive anonymised data (with all identification data removed) from the local authorities for the purpose of monitoring and oversight, to aid research and better policy-making and to evaluate the performance of the support payment for unpaid carers.
Your personal data will only be retained for as long as it is needed for the purposes of the support payment for Unpaid Carers, and for audit and payment purposes. We will keep any records relating to financial transactions for a period of six years.
Your rights
Under data protection legislation, you have the right:
- to be informed of the personal data Welsh Government holds about you and to access it
- to require us to rectify inaccuracies in that data
- to (in certain circumstances) object to or restrict processing
- for (in certain circumstances) your data to be ‘erased’
- to (in certain circumstances) data portability
- to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who is our independent regulator for data protection.
If you wish to exercise your rights under the UK GDPR or wish to make a complaint relating to the processing of you data, you should contact: OlderPeopleandCarers@gov.wales
Alternatively, you can contact the Welsh Government Data Protection Officer at:
Data Protection Officer
Welsh Government
Cathays Park
Cardiff
CF10 3NQ
Email: dataprotectionofficer@gov.wales
The contact details for the Information Commissioner’s Office are:
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Phone: 01625 545 745 or 0303 123 1113.
Website: ico.org.uk
Changes to our policy
We keep our privacy notice under regular review, and we will make new versions available on our privacy notice page on our website.