Privacy notice - Middlesbrough Multi-Agency Children's Hub (MACH)

Middlesbrough Council MACH (Multi-Agency Children’s Hub) provides a single point of contact for anyone with concerns about the welfare and safety of a child or young person. This multi-agency approach enables robust information gathering and enables decisions to be made about whether support is required from Universal, Early Help Services or Children’s Social Care.

We use your personal data which could include name, address, contact details, date of birth, gender, and any information about previous social care and support provided for children. We also use criminal convictions and offences information and ‘special category data’ including ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, health information, and sex life and sexual orientation.

We collect personal information directly from individuals and we receive information from members of the public and organisations such as police, health providers, public health services, schools, academies, and other education providers, other local authorities, probation services, housing providers, and voluntary sector groups.

We use your personal data to meet our legal obligations or to allow us to deliver a ‘public task’ based on our legal powers. We use criminal convictions and offences information and special category data where this is necessary for the provision of health and social care. Some of the laws and statutory guidance that require us to provide these services include the Children Act 2004, Childcare Act 2006, and the UK Government’s statutory guidance ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children (2018)’.

We use your personal data to provide a multi-agency service to ensure children and families can access the services that are most appropriate to them, to protect and keep children and young people safe from harm, to help prevent, detect, or investigate a crime against a child or young person, and to help maintain wider public safety.

Where necessary, we share information with a wide range of third parties including parents, families, and carers, police, health providers, public health services, schools, academies, and other education providers, other local authorities, probation services, housing providers, and voluntary sector groups.

We use the following measures to ensure that your personal data is secure: data protection and security policies, information security incident reporting, data and device encryption, system and data access controls, user accounts and passwords, physical and environmental security, staff vetting practices, staff training and awareness, data back-ups, ICT network penetration testing, and business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

We only keep your personal data for as long as the Law allows or where we have anonymised the information. For more information about ‘Records Management Retention Schedules’ visit our website.

We do not send your personal data outside of the European Economic Area.

We will never use your information for direct marketing purposes.

Your Information Rights are set out in law and, subject to some exceptions, you have the:

• Right to rectification - to ask for information to be corrected
• Right to erasure - to have your personal data deleted
• Right to object - to how your data is used
• Right to restriction - to request limits on how your data is used
• Right to portability - to request that we move your data to another organisation
• Right of subject access - to request a copy of data the Council holds about you

If you have a concerns about the way we are collecting or using your personal data, you should raise your concern with us in the first instance or directly to the Information Commissioner's Office. Visit the website of the Information Commissioner's Office.

If you would like to discuss anything in this privacy notice or your information rights, please contact:

The Data Protection Officer
Middlesbrough Council
PO Box 500, Middlesbrough, TS1 9FT
Phone: 01642 245432
Email: dataprotection@middlesbrough.gov.uk