Guidance

Housing support grant-funded services: privacy notice

Published 5 February 2025

Applies to England

This privacy notice provides information to people receiving housing support and drug and alcohol treatment about sharing their data to help improve the support available.

Some local councils are using the government’s housing support grant to fund a range of services to help people access and stay in housing, while improving their recovery from drug and alcohol use. For more information about the grant, see the ‘Housing support grant and services’ section below.

Who we are

We are the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). We collect information on alcohol and drug treatment, so we can make sure we are improving the lives of people affected by drug and alcohol misuse.

We have a database that collects data about housing from people who are in housing support services while they are also in drug and alcohol treatment.

We also have a database called the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS), which we use to collect information about drug and alcohol treatment in England. You can find more about NDTMS data and how it is used in NDTMS: consent and privacy notice.

Housing support grant and services

The housing support grant (HSG) is a government-funded programme that provides funding to some local councils for people who are in drug and alcohol treatment and need support for their housing. For more information about the HSG, see housing support funding: allocations 2022 to 2025.

A range of different services are being funded to support people to access and stay in housing, while improving their recovery from drug and alcohol use. These include floating support workers, specialist housing caseworkers and tenancy sustainment workers.

We want to understand if the HSG is working well for people in drug and alcohol treatment, so we are monitoring some outcomes, which are:

• changes to your accommodation status
• changes to your housing support needs
• drug and alcohol treatment outcomes

What information we collect

We collect data about you from 3 sources, which are:

• NDTMS, which collects data about drug and alcohol treatment, and when you start accessing housing-related support
• Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which collects data about housing benefit claims
• HSG-funded agencies and local councils, which collect data about your housing, health and treatment

Personal data

We collect the following types of personal data from you:

• name
• date of birth
• sex
• National Insurance number
• local council you live in
• housing status
• housing suitability

Special category data

We will also collect special category data, which is personal data that needs more protection because it is sensitive.

The special category data we use is information relating to your physical and mental health condition, specifically outcomes related to drug and alcohol treatment.

You can read more about special category data at the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

Data controller

DHSC and the local council provider are independent data controllers working together under a data sharing agreement.

As a data controller, we are responsible for the information you share with us, which means that we:

• have a responsibility to protect your privacy
• decide how to use the information you consent to share with us
• are responsible for keeping you informed about changes to how we collect or use your information

What we do with your information

The HSG service currently helping you collects information to help them do that job. That information is called personal data because it could potentially identify you. You can help improve lives and support available (to yourself and others) by agreeing to share some of that personal data with us.

If you choose to share your data, we will use your data to help to understand how housing support can best help people in drug and alcohol treatment. We will do this by sharing some information with RAND Europe, the organisation that will carry out an evaluation on behalf of DHSC.

If you choose to share your data, you can still change your mind at any time without this affecting your legal rights or access to any services you are using.

If you choose not to share your data, you will not see any difference in the treatment or support you receive. But without your data it will be more difficult for us to help improve lives and the support available to people who need it.

Why we collect your data

We collect your data to carry out analysis of the different outcomes that we are interested in, which are listed above. The analysis will look at the changes in these outcomes during the period you are receiving housing-related support funded by the HSG.

The 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:

• because it is in the public’s interest or the controller’s official authority
• for reasons of public interest in the area of public health (for example, to ensure high standards of quality and safety of care)
• for archiving, scientific or historical research or statistical purposes

These legal bases only apply if we take suitable and specific measures to protect your rights, and we only use your information for the purposes we describe in the section above on what we do with your information.

Who your data will be shared with

Your information will be shared with staff in DHSC who have had special training and who work using a secure system, and with the staff in your local council who are responsible for commissioning the organisation you are receiving support from. 

We need to share some information outlined in the ‘Personal data’ section above with RAND Europe, the organisation who will be contracted through the National Institute for Health Research on behalf of DHSC to evaluate the HSG. The information shared with RAND Europe will be anonymised to reduce the risk of your identity being revealed.

We may need to share your name, date of birth and National Insurance number with DWP as part of the evaluation, to understand how the support you have received has affected your housing status.

We remove any personal information that might identify you (such as initials, National Insurance number, date of birth and postcode) before we:

• publish any reports about HSG outcomes
• use the data within DHSC

How long we keep your data

We will keep 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.

Data submitted to DHSC through the NDTMS is held for different lengths of time depending on its purpose and use. The national NDTMS collection is a valuable public health asset and is not deleted, because there are ongoing requirements for its use, for example analysis over longer periods of time going back to 2004.

Regional NDTMS teams help treatment services with data quality work and with understanding published reports on the data. The data they hold for these purposes is kept up to 41 months.

All personal HSG data sent to DHSC outside of NDTMS will be stored for 8 years, or for 5 years after funding for housing-related support finishes, whichever is longer. This is so the data can still be used to evaluate different types of support even when the programme has finished. Once the data has been used as described, we will securely delete all identifiable data.

How we protect your data and keep it secure

We securely protect the information we hold and DHSC has dedicated storage areas for research data, which have controlled access. 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 several rights and processing your data does not take away or reduce these rights under the UK GDPR and the 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

Some of these rights may not apply when the data is being used for research. We will let you know if this is the case.

There are also some circumstances in which we cannot delete your data. For example, if it has been anonymised and we cannot tell which data relates to you.

For general queries about DHSC’s data collection that your support worker cannot help you with, you can contact the team managing the HSG data collection by email at drugtreatmentgrants@dhsc.gov.uk.

Contact us or make a complaint

We will always try to respond to concerns or queries that you have about your data.

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 this programme, 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 review and will be updated if necessary. All updated versions will be marked by a change note on this privacy notice’s publication page.