Call for evidence outcome

Privacy notice

Updated 17 May 2023

Applies to England

Summary of initiative

The government is committed to improving mental health and wellbeing outcomes, particularly for people who experience worse outcomes than the general population. This is a key part of our commitment to ‘level up’, and address unequal outcomes and life chances across the country.

The government has committed to develop a new cross-government 10-year plan for mental health and wellbeing for England to support this objective.

We want to ensure our new plan responds to the public’s priorities and set out what we can all do as a whole society to drive better outcomes. We all have mental health, and all have a part to play in changing things for the better.

Therefore, we are launching a discussion paper and call for evidence to ask the public a range of questions to help develop the new plan.

As part of this discussion, we will be collecting responses which will contain data that we need to keep safe. This notice explains how we will do that.

Data controller

Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is the data controller for data you provide through our online form (hosted by a company we work with called SurveyOptic) for collecting discussion responses. Our Data Protection Officer can be contacted at data_protection@dhsc.gov.uk.

What personal data we collect

At the beginning of the survey, we will ask whether you are responding as an individual or an organisation and your age.

If you are responding and you are under the age of 13, you will need consent from a parent or guardian. Your parent or guardian will need to provide their name and email address to give this consent. DHSC will not receive this information as all survey responses will be fully anonymised by SurveyOptic.

If you are responding and you are over the age of 13, we will give you the option to provide your name and email address and to tell us whether or not we can use it for the following reasons:

• if you are not able to complete the survey and would like to be reminded

• to verify it is your response, if you would like to amend or delete it

You will also have the opportunity to disclose whether you have had personal experiences with mental ill-health, as well as your ethnicity, sex, gender identity and the region you live in. You can select ‘prefer not to say’ or leave the question blank if you do not want to provide this information. We are only collecting this data to analyse any trends and to make sure we have a broad range of people responding to the survey. We will not use this data to identify you or for any other purpose.

We will also be asking open questions with free text answer boxes. Please do not include any information that could directly identify you in these boxes. Some people, particularly if they have had personal experiences with mental ill-health, may choose to disclose information about themselves in these boxes. For example, they might give their name or their exact age as context for a response.

If we receive any responses which include information that we think may directly identify you, we will seek to remove this information where possible.

How we use your data (purposes)

We ask for this information so that we can provide better services to the public. In this instance, we will use the data to inform the development of the mental health and wellbeing plan. All data will be anonymised in the mental health and wellbeing plan which means that nobody who provides a response to this survey will be identifiable from the information we publish.

Legal basis for processing personal data

Under data protection law, we need to tell you what our legal basis is for processing the data you are providing to us.

Our legal basis is consent. This means that you (or your parent or guardian if under 13 years old) have agreed to provide this information to us.

Data processors and other recipients of personal data

When you respond to the survey online, this information is handled by a company we work with called SurveyOptic (who provide the online form). SurveyOptic will then make sure any information that could identify you is removed before sending the information to DHSC. Should we notice any identifying information is left in your response when it comes to DHSC, we will seek to remove this information where possible.

If we receive a large number of responses to this call for evidence, we may need help from another organisation to analyse the responses. This would involve sharing your information with that organisation and they will also have security measures in place to make sure your data is safe and isn’t accessed by anyone who doesn’t need to see it. Once our analysis work is finished, any organisations who have helped us with this work will also fully delete any personal data from their systems.

We will only share anonymised data with other government departments where we need their help with analysing the responses. You will not be identifiable from this data.

We do not sell data to anyone else, nor do we provide it for companies to use for marketing or advertising purposes.

We would only share personal data with any other organisation if we are required to do so by law.

International data transfers and storage locations

Your data will be stored in the UK. We have security procedures in place to make sure your information is safe and to make sure it doesn’t get lost or accessed by anyone who doesn’t need to see it.

Retention and disposal policy

Your data will be held for 2 years from the closure of the call for evidence. This will allow us to use the data to improve the services we provide and after 2 years, we will safely delete it.

How we keep your data secure

Both DHSC and SurveyOptic have security procedures in place to make sure your information is safe and to make sure it doesn’t get lost or accessed by anyone who doesn’t need to see it.

This includes only allowing authorised persons access to your data via methods like password protection, encryption and making sure that the servers we use are secure.

Your rights as a data subject

By law, data subjects have a number of rights and this processing does not take away or reduce these rights. The Data Protection Act and the General Data Protection Regulations set out the following rights for you as an individual. Some of these rights won’t always be applicable depending on how your data is processed. This will be explained to you in full if you decide to contact us about these.

These rights are:

• the right to get copies of information – individuals have the right to ask for a copy of any information about them that is used

• the right to get information corrected – individuals have the right to ask for any information held about them that they think is inaccurate, to be corrected

• the right to limit how the information is used – individuals have the right to ask for any of the information held about them to be restricted, for example, if they think inaccurate information is being used

• the right to object to the information being used – individuals can ask for any information held about them to not be used. However, this is not an absolute right, and continued use of the information may be necessary, with individuals being advised if this is the case

• the right to get information deleted – this is not an absolute right, and continued use of the information may be necessary, with individuals being advised if this is the case

Comments or complaints

Anyone unhappy or wishing to complain about how personal data is used as part of this programme, should contact data_protection@dhsc.gov.uk in the first instance or write to:

Data Protection Officer
1st Floor North
39 Victoria Street
London
SW1H 0EU

Anyone who is still not satisfied can complain to the Information Commissioners Office. Their website address is www.ico.org.uk and their postal address is:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Automated decision making or profiling

We do not make decisions about anyone using only electronic systems which would significantly impact them. Any such decisions would always include human involvement.

Changes to this policy

This privacy notice is kept under regular review, and new versions will be available on our privacy notice page on our website. This privacy notice was last updated on 7 April 2022.