Data Handling Policy

The Acol Village Appraisal 2024 Household Survey is an important step in our gathering information on the village and informing policy development. How we handle the data we collect needs to be done with care. There have been some concerns and questions raised about the survey and the data being collected, so it is worth discussing how the parish council will act.

ICO and UK GDPR
Acol Parish Council is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (reg. ref.: ZB609332) and, like all public bodies, we are bound by UK GDPR legislation (UK Data Protection Act, 2018).

Under the legislation, for the survey we are classed as Data Controller, and as it is our responsibility to determine 'why' and 'how' the personal data should be processed. In addition, to controlling the data, APC will also process the data. Under the Act, there are six available lawful bases for processing, and in this case, it is under (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.

Having established the legal basis for Data Processing, the processing of the data will follow well-established data entry and analysis practice.

Data Entry
We will not use addresses as survey identifiers. Once we have all the copies, we will "shuffle" them, after which we will number each of them incrementally whilst redacting any addresses or other identifiers that have may have been written on the forms. We will not group by street or collection bundle to minimise the likelihood of association of collected data with any household. 

We will also disassociate the final data regarding volunteering from the rest of the data. It is directly identifying (names and emails), so we will process and store this data separate from the rest of the survey data.

We will perform double data entry, and then compare where they match/don't match with reconciliation on differences.

Data Analysis
The survey ranges across several areas including village demographics, transport, recreational interests, planning development, etc. As we are a small village, depending on the response rate, some types of analysis may be either statistically misleading or inappropriate.

We will issue a report that provides insights from the data, along with a set of data presentations, primarily summary statistics aggregated by variable e.g. analysis by age group or analysis by gender. We will be cautious in the use of combined variable analysis, e.g. analysis of age group by gender, as these, by their nature, can be more identifying of people. We will also identify data limitations (e.g. missing data).

Data Destruction, Storage, Access, and Sharing
We will destroy the survey copies after data entry, QC and reconciliation is completed for the survey, and record that this has been done. Data will be held securely and access available only to those that require it to perform tasks that are compatible with the purposes under which the data was collected/processed. We will not release full sets of the raw data. Any potential sharing of subsets of the data (raw or aggregated) beyond the survey report would require agreement of the council and comply with UK GDPR legislation.