Preserving Your Privacy

In keeping with Government requirements for transparency in public services all planning applications and supporting documentation is scanned and made available for public scrutiny through the Planning Public Access service. When scanning documents we take reasonable care to ensure that we are operating within the constraints of the Data Protection Act 1998, and the Freedom of Information Act 2005.

While we are legally enabled to publish correspondent's names and addresses we can also undertake to withhold this information to protect individuals in certain exceptional circumstances, such as those in refuge from domestic violence, those whose occupation requires anonimity, or persons in the public eye. If you are in such a category and wish us to withhold publication of your name and address, please inform us when you submit your documents.

Although we take measures to protect sensitive documents it is not unusual for older applications and correspondence to have been collected by search engines such as Google. Where this occurs we will not undertake to request removal from search engine providers, but we may redact or reindex the original scanned document if a data protection breach has occurred.

All applicants and contributors to applications are advised that they should take care not to include personal data such as mobile or personal telephone numbers and email addresses on any document sent to the Planning Department. We scan many hundreds of documents each week and cannot be sure that all occurrences of such data may be noted and removed. If you wish to provide these details to the planning officers it is best to do so in a covering note which will not be scanned.

When making comments by email it is often best if you add the comments in an attachment rather than in the body of the email, this will enables us to scan the attachment without having to scan the Email header and return address. We should also advise that when submitting comments these should be related only to planning matters and care should be taken not to include anything that might cause offence.

If making a handwritten submission it may be advisable to strike diagonally through your signature once. This will leave the signature readable but will assist in preventing it being copied.

We are aware that commercial companies may copy weekly lists of planning applications as a source for cold-calling to offer building and similar services. The council has no means of preventing this and advise intending applicants that they may wish to use the Telephone Preference Service and Mail Preference Service, as detailed below, to prevent themselves from being exposed to such practises.

Telephone preference service http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/ - The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is a central opt out register whereby individuals can register their wish not to receive unsolicited sales and marketing telephone calls. It is a legal requirement that companies do not make such calls to numbers registered on the TPS.

Mail preference service http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/ - The MPS Consumer File is a list of names and addresses of consumers who have requested not to receive sales and advertising mail. The use of the Consumer File by direct mail organisations is a requirement of the British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing administered by the Advertising Standards Authority. It is also a condition under the Code of Practice of the Direct Marketing Association.

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