Fair processing notices - Trading standards

Trading standards' role is to enforce consumer protection legislation with the purpose of protecting residents, ensuring fair trading amongst businesses and preventing and detecting crime.

We also offer a civil advice service and may contact traders on behalf of consumers in an attempt to resolve a dispute.

To enable us to perform our duties, intelligence and data will be collected, stored and processed about individuals and businesses.

Information will be collected from complaints, inspections, licence applications or registrations, investigations and service requests. We also receive information from other agencies and regulators.

The information we collect is used:

• to monitor and ensure compliance with statutory requirements
• to investigate and enforce trading standards legislation
• to provide updates on the progress of investigations, complaints and enquiries
• to offer advice and guidance to businesses and members of the public

We use your data in this way in order to deliver a service which is part of our public task. This means we are carrying out a public service in line with legislation.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulates all the general processing of personal data that we do with regard to this service. We operate as a competent authority with regard to the law enforcement elements of this work and the processing of personal data for this is regulated by Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018.

All information will be kept securely and our policies ensure that your information is protected, and available only to the trading standards staff who require access to it. We will only keep personal information for the time specified in our retention schedule or as required by the acts and regulations relating to the matter we are dealing with. 

GDPR provides you with certain rights regarding personal data or special information we hold, but not all of these rights will be available to you in all situations. Where we are under a legal duty to use data for a particular purpose you will not have the right to prevent it being used in that way

• you can ask to see the information held about you
• you can ask what is being done with the information held about you
• you can ask to have some of the data held about you deleted
• you can ask to have a decision made about you by a computer reviewed, and ask for a new decision to be made by a person
• you can ask us to stop processing the data we hold about you
• you can ask us to make changes to data about you that you believe is inaccurate
• in some circumstances you can ask us to help you move your information to another organisation
• you can ask us to restrict or limit what we do with your data, for example if you believe the data we hold is inaccurate, or if you believe our processing of the data is unlawful

Data we hold may be shared with the council’s internal audit team for the purposes of evaluating the effectiveness of the organisation’s risk management, control and governance processes, and with the council's corporate fraud team for the prevention and detection of fraud. 

It may also be shared with organisations outside the council for prescribed purposes such as  preventing or detecting crime or for tax collection. Such organisations include:

• other regulators such as Food Standards Agency, Department of the Environment and Rural Affairs, Environment Agency, Health and Safety Executive, HM Revenue and Customs, Department of Work and Pensions, Home Office Immigration, National Trading Standards, Illegal Money Lending Team, Insolvency Service
• other Stoke-on-Trent City Council departments, such as licensing, environmental health, council tax, adult safeguarding, planning, revenues and benefits
• other local authorities
• police forces and fire and rescue services
• judicial agencies such as the courts and the Crown Prosecution Service

Complete our online form to ask us about this

You can also write to the information rights team at foi@stoke.gov.uk or Information Rights Team, Floor 2, Civic Centre, Glebe Street, Stoke-on-Trent ST4 1HH

This number for the Information Right’s Team is for enquiries specifically about your rights under the Data Protection Act, Freedom of Information Act or the Environmental Information Regulations.

Please call the Customer Access Team on 01782 234234 in the first instance for any queries about the service that you are enquiring about.

 
If you wish to complain about how your personal information has been handled by the city council, contact the information rights team in the first instance, on the details provided above.

If you remain dissatisfied the Information Commissioner’s Office can be contacted.

Information Commissioner's Office website

You have the right to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office at any time.