Dundee Child Poverty Pathfinder – impact evaluation: privacy notice

Understanding privacy notices

A privacy notice explains how your personal data is used by an organisation. Personal data is information that identifies you like your name and address. This privacy notice explains how your personal data will be used as part of the evaluation of the Dundee Child Poverty Pathfinder.

About the research

The Dundee Child Poverty Pathfinder aims to improve support for families locally and ultimately to help reduce child poverty. The Scottish Government has been evaluating the Dundee Pathfinder using a range of approaches.

The next stage of the evaluation will involve looking at employment and income for people who received Pathfinder support two years after their first contact with the Pathfinder, and comparing these to outcomes for similar people in other areas of Scotland who did not receive Pathfinder support. This helps us to understand whether the outcomes seen were as a result of receiving Pathfinder support.

We are looking at employment and income because these outcomes most closely relate to the aim of reducing poverty. We know families may gain other benefits from their involvement with the Pathfinder (like wellbeing and confidence) and have explored these through other elements of the research.

The results of the evaluation will be used by Scottish Government to learn about how best to support families in Scotland.

Who is carrying out the research

The research is being carried out by Ipsos UK, on behalf of the Scottish Government. Ipsos is a specialist research agency, independent of the Scottish Government and Dundee City Council, and a member of the Market Research Society. This means it follows rules and guidelines set by the Market Research Society Code of Conduct.

Who is responsible for your data

The Scottish Government is the data controller for this research. This means it is in charge of what happens to the data. Scottish Government is responsible for the secure transfer, storage and deletion of your personal data.

Scottish Government will put in place data sharing agreements with Dundee City Council, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Social Security Scotland to access data about families who engaged with the Dundee Pathfinder and other comparable families for this study.

Ipsos UK is the data processor for the Scottish Government. This means that Ipsos will be handling and using your data for the research. This will be in an anonymous form so that you cannot personally be identified.

Scottish Government will not share your personal data with anyone else as part of this research.

Why and how we will use your data

We will be using your data to assess whether participation in the Dundee Pathfinder leads to improved employment and household income, in order to learn about how best to support families in the future.

In order to do this, Scottish Government will link together data from Dundee City Council about families who took part in the Pathfinder, with data from DWP, HMRC and Social Security Scotland for families in Dundee and other areas of Scotland.  The data shared will include:

• personal information, including your name, address and date of birth, in order to link the datasets together
• data about your household, including the number of adults and children in a household and their age
• data about employment and income from benefits (including for any children who have reached adulthood by the time the data is shared)

After the datasets have been linked, your personal data (name, address and date of birth) will be removed before the analysis starts, so that you can no longer be identified.

Your data will be used for the purposes of this research only. At the end of the research, a report will be written based on the findings, which will be published on the Scottish Government website. Only summary statistics will be used in the report and it will not be possible to identify you.

By law, we must have a “legal basis” for using personal data in this way. This means that we need to have a good reason to be allowed to do this. The legal basis for using your personal data for this research is ‘public task’.  This means it is being used to support the work of government. In this case, it will support Scottish Government in helping to support families and reduce child poverty, which they are required to do under the law.

Where personal data will be held and processed and how long for

All personal data used for this evaluation will be stored securely by Scottish Government in a protected electronic folder that only the research team have access to. It will be stored and processed in the United Kingdom.

Your personal data will be kept securely until the analysis is complete, approximately one year after the start of the research. Anonymous data (in which you cannot be personally identified) will be kept securely for a further year, in case of any queries Scottish Government receives about the research. The data will then be securely deleted.

Ensuring your personal information is secure

The Scottish Government takes information security extremely seriously and has a legal duty to protect it. It applies various strict precautions to ensure that your information is protected from loss, theft or misuse. Security precautions include appropriate physical security of offices and controlled, limited access to secure computer systems.

Ipsos UK also takes data security seriously and have been certified to ISO 27001, which shows they meet a high standard for information security. Ipsos researchers will undergo Scottish Government security screening and will only access the data from a Scottish Government secure location.

What your rights are

Scottish Government follows the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). UK GDPR is designed to give you more control over your personal data. This means you have the right to access your personal data, correct it, or object to/restrict processing in some cases. We will judge each request made on a case by case basis.

After your data has been linked, the data will be anonymised with any personal data that could identify you removed, so at this point it will no longer be possible to remove your individual details from the dataset. We will inform you when you make a request if this is the case.

Questions or queries

If anything in this privacy notice is not clear, or you would like us to talk you through it, please contact the Scottish Government Research Lead for this evaluation at kathryn.ray@gov.scot.

If you have questions or concerns about how your personal data is being used by the Scottish Government, or if you believe that we have not complied with your data protection rights, you can contact a Data Protection Officer at the Scottish Government using the details below.

Scottish Government Data Protection Officer:

Email: DataProtectionOfficer@gov.scot
Address: Victoria Quay, Commercial Street, Edinburgh, EH6 6QQ

Complaints

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). If you are unhappy with the way your personal data are being processed, you can report it to the ICO at https://ico.org.uk/concerns or by calling the ICO helpline on 0303 123 1113.