Wales fuel support scheme: privacy notice

If you are in receipt of a working age means-tested benefit and you (or your partner) are responsible for paying the energy bills for your home then you may be entitled to a £200 payment towards your fuel costs this winter.

If you apply for this payment we will need to process your personal data to assess whether you are eligible to receive financial support and, if so, to provide a payment to you. This privacy notice sets out what personal data we will use, how we will use it and why.

Welsh Government will be the data controller for the personal data collected on our behalf by your local authority via your application for the purposes of assessing eligibility, administering and making payments under the Wales fuel support scheme.

Your local authority will also collect and match your information with other data held by other public bodies such as:

• The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for information about the benefits you are in receipt of such as Universal Credit, Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment Support Allowance).

Your local authority has been engaged by us as a data processor for these purposes and will deal with applications from those resident within their boundaries. They will carry out checks with the DWP to ensure you are claiming a qualifying benefit and, if necessary, ask for proof that you are the person responsible for paying the energy bill at your property.

We will not otherwise share your data with other organisations or individuals outside of the Welsh Government for any other purpose not related to the Wales fuel support scheme.

Your local authority has been asked to hold all of your personal data in relation to your application for a Wales fuel support scheme payment. Although the Welsh Government is the Data Controller in this circumstance, we will not normally receive any personal information about you, except in the event you wish to make a complaint, or to exercise your data protection rights under the 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 winter fuel support scheme payment 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 winter fuel support scheme.  

We will only keep your personal data for as long as it is needed and for audit and payment purposes. We will keep any records relating to financial transactions for a period of six years.

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 GDPR or wish to make a complaint relating to the processing of you data, you should contact ProsperousFutures@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

We keep our privacy notice under regular review, and we will make new versions available on our privacy notice page on our website.