Privacy Notice

The City of London Corporation (“the City Corporation”) is committed to protecting your privacy when you use any of our services. This Privacy Notice explains how we use information about you and how we protect your privacy.

If you have any concerns or questions about how we look after your personal information, contact the City Corporation’s Data Protection Officer, also the Comptroller and City Solicitor, Michael Cogher. You can email the Information Officer or write to PO Box 270, Guildhall, London EC2P 2EJ.

1. Your personal information

Personal information is anything that directly or indirectly identifies and relates to a living person, such as a name, address, telephone number, date of birth, unique identification number, photographs, video recordings (including CCTV) etc.

Some personal information is ‘special category data’ and needs more protection due to its sensitivity. This includes any information about an identifiable individual that can reveal their sexuality and sexual health, religious or philosophical beliefs, racial origin, ethnicity, physical or mental health, trade union membership, political opinion, genetic/biometric data. Personal information relating to criminal offences and convictions, although not ‘special category data’, is still sensitive in nature and merits higher protection.

2. Why do we need your personal information?

We may need to use some information about you to:

• deliver Local Authority services required by law and other services which extend beyond our statutory duties
• achieve the six strategic outcomes set out in our Corporate Plan 2024-2029
• support and promote the City of London, London and the UK
• contact you about our services to get your views, which helps us to manage them
• help investigate any concerns or complaints you have about our services
• keep track of spending on services
• check the quality of services; and
• to help with research and planning of new services

3. How the law allows us to use your personal information

There are a number of legal reasons why we will need to collect and use your personal information in different circumstances.

Generally, we collect and use personal information where:

• you, or your legal representative, have given consent
• you have entered into a contract with us
• it is necessary to perform our statutory duties or other legitimate purposes
• it is necessary to protect someone in an emergency
• it is required by law
• it is necessary for employment purposes
• it is necessary to deliver health or social care services
• you have made your information publicly available
• it is necessary for legal cases
• it is to the benefit of society as a whole
• it is necessary to protect public health
• it is necessary for archiving, research, or statistical purposes

This privacy notice is provided in a layered format, ie the following sit underneath this main notice, and the links below will provide you with more detail in relation to the collection and use of personal information, for specific City Corporation services.

• Barbican Centre

For more information in relation to the collection and use of personal information for events and strategic engagement at the City Corporation please download the Strategic Engagement and Events privacy notice below.

For further information in relation to the collection of personal data regarding the Test and Trace scheme, please download the Test and Trace privacy notice below.

If you are unable to identify any specific service or have any queries regarding any of the information provided in the links, email the Information Officer.

The Chamberlain’s Department consists of a range of financial and management services are provided including: stewardship of the City of London Corporation's finances and assets, budget setting, forecasting and monitoring; strategic financial advice to members, departments and the City Corporation as a whole; corporate accounting; monitoring of investment securities portfolios and treasury management of cash balances; billing and collection of local taxes and sundry income; payment of invoices and the assessment of benefits to support City residents.

The Department of the Chief Operating Officer exists to enable the wider City of London Corporation to deliver its aims and objectives through providing corporate and wider support to our key functions. The following functions make up the COO Department: Commercial Services, Corporate Health & Safety, Digital and Information Technology Services (DITS), Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), Human Resources (HR), Markets and Project Governance.

CSD is responsible for the City Corporation’s property investment portfolio, corporate real estate and property/construction projects, and also includes the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) the principal Crown Court of England and Wales.

The Department of Community and Children’s Services (the Department) delivers a wide range of services. These are predominantly in response to a statutory (legal) requirement to support certain adult and child residents with needs – such as with adult and children’s social care, support with special educational needs or those that ask the local authority for help with homelessness- or with access to education. 

The department supports one “maintained” (state) school, The Aldgate School that provides primary education for some children living in the Square Mile and others in neighbouring authorities and has a legal duty to ensure resident children have school places. 

Similarly, the Adults Skills and Education Service, provides for residents and non-residents Public Health services – such as stopping smoking, health promotion, and drug and alcohol services- target both those who live and work in the Square Mile. 

The Department’s Community Library Service is open to all residents and workers, some offer services – such as home delivery – limited to those who live in the Square Mile.

The Department provides housing services (management, repair, and development of housing stock) to residents in the Square Mile and across our estates in six other London local authority areas. 

The Community Safety Team delivers a key role in coordinating the statutory Community Safety Partnership and wors across the Corporation and with partner services (City of London Police, probation, health and fire services amongst others including the voluntary sector) to address community safety issues, such as complex cases of anti-social behaviour that arise in the Square Mile.

The Comptroller and City Solicitors Department is responsible for providing all legal services required by the City of London. This includes providing legal advice to Committees, Departments of the Corporation, to the Commissioner of Police for the City, and to institutions for whom the Comptroller & City Solicitor is required to act as legal adviser (e.g. the Museum of London).

The main areas of law covered by the C&CS include commercial property and land law, housing, litigation, employment law, contract law, planning, trusts and company law.

The department deals with over 2,000 new legal matters every year and this covers anything from heavyweight property acquisition and disposals to horse riding byelaws in Epping Forest.

The Environment Department provides front-line services to the City and beyond including but not limited to: 

• Management of open spaces;
• Operational, transport and public realm activity on the Square Mile’s streets and public spaces;
• Planning and Development including policy, the District Surveyor’s office and the City Property Advisory Team;
• Environmental health, trading standards, licensing, port health, and animal health & welfare.

This notice describes how the City of London Corporation (“the City Corporation”) as a data controller collects and uses personal information about current and former employees, workers, and contractors. during and after employment/engagement, in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018). The Notice will be reviewed periodically and may be updated at any time.

This notice describes how the City of London Corporation (“the City Corporation”) as a data controller collects and uses the personal information about job applicants which they provide when applying for employment in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018). The Notice will be reviewed periodically and may be updated at any time.

4. Consent

If we have consent to use your personal information for any particular reason, you have the right to remove your consent at any time. If you want to remove your consent, contact the Information Officer and tell us which service you are using, so we can deal with your request.

5. Your rights regarding your personal information

The law gives you a number of rights in relation to what personal information is used by the City Corporation, and how it is used. These rights are listed below, and full details can be found in the City Corporation’s Data Subject Rights Policy.

You can ask us to:

• provide you with a copy of the personal information that we hold about you
• correct personal information about you which you think is inaccurate
• delete personal information about you if you think we no longer should be using it
• stop using your personal information if you think it is wrong, until it is corrected
• transfer your personal information to another provider in a commonly used format
• not use automated decision-making processes to make decisions about you

6. With whom do we share your personal information?

In some circumstances, we use other organisations to either store personal information or use it to help deliver our services to you. Where we have these arrangements, there is always an agreement in in place to make sure that the organisation complies with data protection law.

Sometimes we have a legal duty to provide personal information to other organisations.

We may also share your personal information when we consider/believe that there is a good reason to do so, which is more important than protecting your privacy. This doesn’t happen often, but in these circumstances we may share your information:

• to find and stop crime and fraud; or
• if there are serious risks to the public, our staff or to other professionals
• to protect a child; or
• to protect adults who are thought to be at risk, for example if they are frail, confused or cannot understand what is happening to them

For all these reasons, the risk must be serious before we can override your right to privacy.

If we are worried about your physical safety or feel we need to take action to protect you from being harmed in other ways, we will discuss this with you and, if possible, get your permission to tell others about your situation before doing so.

We may still share your information if we believe the risk to others is serious enough to do so.

If this is the case, we will make sure that we record what information we share and our reasons for doing so. We will let you know what we have done and why, if we think it is safe to do so.

7. How do we protect your personal information?

We have a legal duty to make sure we hold your personal information (on paper and electronically) in a secure way, and to only make it available to those who have a right to see them. Examples of our security include:

• Encryption, meaning that information is hidden so that it cannot be read without special knowledge (such as a password)
• Pseudonymisation, meaning that we will use a different name or identifier to hide parts of your personal information from view. This means that someone outside of the City Corporation could work on your information for us without ever knowing it was yours
• Controlling access to systems and networks allows us to stop people who are not allowed to view your personal information from getting access to it
• Training for our staff allows us to make them aware of how to handle personal information, and how and when to report when something goes wrong
• Regular testing of our technology and ways of working, including keeping up to date on the latest security updates (commonly called patches)

You can find more details of our Information Security expectations in our IT Security Policy.

8. Information outside of the European Union

The majority of personal information is stored on systems in the UK or EU. However, there are some occasions where your information may leave the UK/EU either to get to another organisation, or where it is stored in a system outside of the EU.

We have additional protections on your personal information if it leaves the UK ranging from secure ways of transferring data to ensuring we have a robust contract in place with that third party.

9. How long do we keep your personal information?

We will only hold your personal information for as long as it is necessary to fulfil our legal duties or business purposes.

There’s often a legal reason for keeping your personal information for a set period of time, and we will include information about retention periods in the layered privacy notices provided above (at section 3).

10. Further advice?

For independent advice about data protection, privacy and data sharing issues, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at:

Information Commissioner's Office Wycliffe House Water Lane Wilmslow Cheshire SK9 5AF

0303 123 1113 (local rate) 01625 545745 (national rate number) Information Commissioner's Office website