Torfaen County Borough Council / My Council Services

The Torfaen app and e-services is provided by the My Council Service (MCS) platform provided by Abavus.

Torfaen County Borough Council will collect your data, including email and physical address on this platform, if you choose to submit these. We will use these to contact you with updates on your service requests and to be able to contact you if required:

·        Your data will be stored securely where it can be viewed and shared where necessary, by our staff, suppliers and partners or our contractors. This ensures your concerns can be directed to the correct part of the council, or to the appropriate service provider if it is a partner.

·        Transmitting information over the internet is generally not completely secure, and therefore we cannot absolutely guarantee the security of your data. Any data you transmit is at your own risk; however, payment transactions are always encrypted. We have procedures and security features in place to keep your data secure once we receive it.

·        We won’t share your information with any other organisations for marketing, market research or commercial purposes. We may pass on your personal information if we have a legal obligation to do so. This includes exchanging information with other Torfaen council departments for other lawful purposes.

·        If you do not agree with this statement and no longer want to use this service, then you can de-register by signing into your account > My Account > De-register my account. You may continue to submit reports anonymously; however, we will be unable to feedback any updates on progress in relation to your request.

You can also request erasure of your data in the My Council Services portal. An anonymised record of services requests and cases is retained for the purposes of accurate historical reporting on service activity by the Council.

All erasure and de-registration processes are subject to the Council’s wider data retention policy. If a data subject requests de-registration, but the Council has the lawful basis for retaining such data, for example if the individual owes money to the Council, then the lawful right to retain data will override the de-registration request.

All the data captured via the My Council Services platform is stored and processed within the UK. All customer data is housed and processed in two data centres in separate London locations: a primary data centre and failover data centre.

Your data stays on the My Council Platform until one of the following happens:

a) Torfaen Council instructs Abavus by the Council to delete it (subject to there being lawful grounds for deletion)

b) Th e Council terminates its contract with Abavus and the related My Council Services instance and all associated data is permanently and irrevocably deleted

c) An individual data subject deletes their data or selects specific records of their data for deletion. In this context any re-registration or deletion request will be subject to the overarching data retention policy that has been set by the Council