DLUHC homelessness services assessment
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) is collecting data with the aim of improving services, by learning more about what causes homelessness and how well homelessness services meet peoples’ needs.
What’s the aim of this study?
By carrying out this research, The DLUHC aims to find out whether:
- Housing services prevent homelessness
- People return for help and/or move regularly
- Homelessness programmes, such as Housing First, reduce homelessness
- There are other causes of homelessness and outcomes, such as poor health
If you are homeless or threatened with homelessness, The DLUHC wants to link information about you and others in your household (if applicable), together with other information including your homelessness application, and past and future information on your use of services and benefits.
The DLUHC will use your personal information to gather the right data held by other government agencies.
The personal information they'll use are your:
- Name
- Date of birth
- Gender
- Last known address
- National Insurance number (if known)
Privacy notice for the collection of data for the DLUHC
Any information you provide will not be used to make any decisions about what benefits you get, services you use, now or in future, or used to identify fraud.
Whose data are you collecting?
We want to collect data on all people asking for help with homelessness.
What’s involved?
At your assessment you will be asked questions about:
- Your experiences of homelessness
- Your support needs
- Whether you have spent time in local authority care, and your current employment status
What will happen to the information provided?
Your information will only be used for research and will be anonymised so the researchers won't know whose data they have. We'll send your information to DLUHC using a secure IT system.
Your personal information (as above) will be used to identify data collected as part of your assessment and linked to information held by other government departments:
- Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – to see what benefits you have received and whether you have been employed
- Ministry of Justice (MOJ) – to see what contact you may have had with the criminal justice system
- Department for Education (DfE) – to see when your child has been in school, how well they are doing at each Key Stage and whether they are a Child in Need
Your personal information will be kept strictly confidential and separately from all the other information in a secure, password-protected document on a computer system. You will be assigned a unique reference number, so that even though a researcher will see all your information, they will not be able to know it is you.
How long will my information be kept for?
DWP, DfE and MOJ will only keep your personal information for a month and will not keep records showing you were part of this research.
The DLUHC will only use your data within the terms of data protection laws; it will keep your personal information for five years, then delete it securely and only keep it for as long as necessary. The DLUHC will review dates for keeping personal data in the future and if necessary update these privacy notices.
To legally share data for this research, we, along with other local authorities and The DLUHC will rely on the Digital Economy Act 2017.
The collection of personal information by DLUHC for this project is compliant with data protection legislation.
We'll collect your personal data under the public task basis (in this case to provide housing services) and agree to share this data with The DLUHC under the public task basis (in this case to reduce homelessness).
The DLUHC will rely on the following reasons for processing personal data and additional special category data below:
A. Lawful basis for processing personal data under Article 6 GDPR
The processing is necessary for this reason:
(E) Public task: the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law.
B. Additional condition for processing special category data under Article 9(2) GDPR
Special category personal data may be processed if:
(g) processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest, on the basis of Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued, respect the essence of the right to data protection and provide for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the fundamental rights and the interests of the data subject;
C. The DPA 2017 will provide a lawful basis to process criminal offence data (as required by Article 10 GDPR).
What are my rights?
You can contact us about whether your data is being used for this project, without it affecting your legal rights or routine care. You can also see copies of all the data The DLUHC hold about you and ask for it to be corrected or deleted.
What if I want more information?
If you want more information you can ask a member of staff. You can also contact The DHULC's Knowledge and Information Team about seeing your data or withdrawing from the research by emailing The DLUHC's Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@communities.gsi.gov.uk.
If you're unhappy with the way your personal information is being handled, you can contact the independent Information Commissioner.
What will happen to the results of this research?
The final results of this research will be published on GOV.UK. You will not be identified in any research report.