A Bed Every Night (ABEN) Privacy Policy

This privacy notice relates to the Manchester ABEN provision Commissioned by Manchester City Council’s (MCC) Homelessness Commissioning Team. It provides additional information that specifically relates to this particular service and should be read together with our general privacy notice.

This service uses personal information, such as:

• Basic personal details such as name, date of birth, and nationality, and some more personal details, such as ethnicity, sexuality, and religious beliefs.
• Records of contacts with support workers, e.g., on the street/in a day centre.
• Your current accommodation situation.
• Information about your support needs, such as whether you have problems with substance misuse or with your physical or mental health.
• Other information that will help to ensure workers understand the services that might help, such as whether you have been in local authority care.

The Council uses your personal data for the following reasons:

• To monitor occupancy levels in accommodation
• To monitor the levels of positive, neutral and negative move on from services
• To help us commission services that meet residents’ needs

We collect and use this information under:

1. Consent: the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose.

MCC have a statutory duty under Homelessness Reduction Act 2018 to help prevent homelessness, enabling people to stay in their home where possible or support them in finding accommodation where the Local Authority does not have a duty to accommodate.

The legal basis for using the EPD to process this information and to share pseudonymised information with the GMCA will be:

• Article 6 1(e) processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller.

And for the more sensitive data:

• Article 9 2(g) processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest.

Your personal information will come from what you share with Manchester’s commissioned ABEN services. This information will be recorded on the ABEN Emergency Provision Database (EPD) upon your induction and exit into ABEN accommodation.

Your personal data is shared securely via the EPD system and is accessible to the below organisations, where it is both necessary and appropriate to do so.

• Manchester City Council’s Homelessness Commissioning Team
• Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA)
• ABEN Commissioned Accommodation Services

What is the ABEN Exit Questionnaire?

On departure from your ABEN accommodation you will be sent a link via email or text message (if these contact details have been provided) to complete a short anonymous survey. The survey is optional to complete, and no incentive will be provided for completion.

The survey response will be stored anonymously alongside your ABEN EPD record. Your response could be used in analysis and any quotes included could be published. Anonymisation has been designed into the storage of this data and it will never be able to be attributed directly to you.

Our retention schedule sets out how long we keep personal information for.

MCC does not use your personal data for automated decision making or profiling.

You can find out more about your rights regarding the personal information used for this service.  Your rights apply to the information held by the Council as a data controller, and the information we hold on behalf of the other data controllers.

Please see our Corporate Privacy Notice if you have any questions, concerns or complaints about how we use your personal information.