Guidance

DATRIG housing support and rough sleeping services: privacy notice

Published 7 January 2026

Applies to England

Summary

The government gives funding to some local councils to provide extra support for people who:

• sleep rough and have a substance use treatment need
• are in drug and alcohol treatment and have a housing support need

These programmes are part of the drug and alcohol treatment and recovery improvement grant (DATRIG). For more information about DATRIG, see Drug and alcohol treatment and recovery funding allocations: 2025 to 2026.

The programmes are delivered by local council commissioned services. They fund a range of different services to support people experiencing rough sleeping and people who need support to access and stay in housing, to help them recover from drug and alcohol dependence.

Who we are

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is the data controller. As the data controller, we are responsible for the information about you that is shared with us. This means that we:

• have a responsibility to protect your privacy
• decide how to use the information
• have a responsibility to keep you informed about changes to how we collect or use your information

What personal data we collect

We collect data about you from 2 sources, which are:

• the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS), which collects data about drug and alcohol treatment, and when you start accessing the programmes’ support
• programme-funded services and local councils, which collect data about your treatment and housing situation

You can find more about NDTMS data and how it is used in NDTMS: consent and privacy notice.

The programmes’ services collect information from you to help them improve the services they provide. The information we collect from your service includes your:

• substance use group (whether you are in treatment for alcohol, opiates or non-opiates)
• housing need (which includes your housing status, housing suitability and risk of homelessness)
• housing-related support activity (such as support finding accommodation, preventing evictions, or support with home maintenance)
• outcomes of your engagement with either housing support or rough sleeping services, and other drug and alcohol treatment services

The service will not share your name or any other identifiable information with us. The data provided to us will be anonymous and in an aggregate format. Aggregate data is information about many people combined, so the data is about more than one person. We will not be able to tell which data relates to which person.

How we use your data

We use the information we collect to:

• evaluate how effective the programmes are in delivering services
• understand if the programmes are working well for people in drug and alcohol treatment, and learn how support can best help people
• provide local information about service users and their needs, to help service commissioners, health and wellbeing boards and local authorities to plan and develop better drug and alcohol treatment services
• produce statistics and research on drug and alcohol treatment and other health issues to help inform future policy decisions

We will use the information we collect to produce reports that will be used to monitor all areas in the country funded by the programmes. These reports will never contain any personal or identifiable information.

Legal basis for processing your data

Data protection legislation requires us to have a valid legal reason to process and use personal data about you. This is often called a ‘legal basis’. Under Articles 6 and 9 of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the legal bases we rely on for processing your information are that it’s necessary:

• to perform a task or function in the public interest or for our official functions and the task or function has a clear basis in law
• for reasons of substantial public interest (with a basis in law)

Who your data will be shared with

We cannot share anything about you as an individual, or information that might identify who you are, with any other organisations because the data we have is anonymised.

How long we keep your data

We will keep anonymised personal data either for as long as it is needed for the purposes described in this privacy notice, or the period required by law or other regulations, whichever is longer.

We need to keep your information because there are things we need to keep using it for, like evaluating the effectiveness of different types of support provided to you and other people in programme-funded services, even after the programmes have finished.

How we keep your data secure

Data is held on secure computer systems, which are kept up-to-date to protect them from viruses and hacking. There are also comprehensive policies and processes to make sure that users and administrators of DHSC information know their obligations and responsibilities for the data they have access to.

Your data will not be transferred outside of the UK. All data is stored on computers or servers located in the UK.

Your rights

By law, you have a number of rights, and processing your data does not take away or reduce these rights under the UK GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act 2018.

You have the right to:

• ask for and receive copies of information about you
• get information about you corrected if you think it’s inaccurate
• limit how your information is used, for example you can ask for it to be restricted if you think it’s inaccurate
• object to your information being used
• get information deleted

The data provided to us is anonymous and in aggregate format, so we cannot act on personal data requests because we are unable to identify individual records. If you want to exercise your rights under data protection law, please contact your local service provider or council directly.

Contact us or make a complaint

If you are unhappy about how your personal data is being used, or if you want to complain about how your data is used as part of these programmes, you should email data_protection@dhsc.gov.uk or write to:

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

If you are still not satisfied, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). You can find out how to contact them at the ICO website.

Their postal address is:

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

Changes to this privacy notice

This privacy notice is kept under regular review and will be updated if necessary. All updated versions will be marked by a change note on this privacy notice’s publication page.