Privacy Notice

Epping Forest District Council will use the information we hold about you to process your claim for Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit.

We may pass the information to other agencies or organisations such as the Department for Work and Pensions or HM Revenues and Customs, as allowed by law. We may check information you have provided, or information about you that someone else has provided, with other information held by us.

We may also get information about you from certain third parties, or give them information to

1. Prevent or detect crime
2. Protect public funds
3. Make sure information is correct

These third parties include government departments, local authorities and private-sector companies such as banks, organisations that may lend you money and companies that assist us in fraud detection and prevention such as Credit Reference Agencies.

We will not give information about you to anyone else, or use information about you for other purposes, unless the law allows us to.

Data Sharing with Credit Reference Agencies

Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit are social security benefits that are administered by Local Authorities. The law allows DWP to share information about its customers with Local Authorities for Housing Benefit or Council Tax Benefit purposes so that they can calculate the correct amount of benefit to pay. Local Authority staff with responsibility for administering Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit has electronic access to the DWP information they need for this purpose.

The law also allows DWP to data match Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit with information held by Credit Reference Agencies.

Data matching is where information held on one computer system is compared electronically with information from one or more other computer systems. DWP may compare the information from the Housing Benefit/Council Tax Benefit system with that on systems used by the Credit Reference Agencies to identify possible fraud or error.

DWP currently has a contract with the Credit Reference Agency Experian to carry out data matching for each Local Authority to identify undeclared Living Together benefit fraud.

The contract stipulates that no electronic ‘footprint’ will be left on individual customer’s credit accounts. This means that the data matching will not affect people’s credit ratings. The contract also specifies that Experian must not use the DWP data for any other purposes.