Information management consent maintenance overview
Increasingly, housing organisations see the benefit of gathering more customer data in order to continually improve their service offering and to make informed decisions about future provision. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), social housing providers have a significant obligation to explain in clear terms why data is being collected from a tenant and how specifically it will be utilised. Central to that regulation is the requirement to obtain an individual's consent through a clear and affirmative action, to maintain evidential records of that consent, and to keep those records accurate through a process of continual review. For an individual's consent to be valid, it must be freely given, specific to the circumstances around the data processing activity and capable of being withdrawn at any time. When a consent request is submitted, the tenant has a clear right to decline; they can also withdraw permission at any stage in the future, should they change their mind.
Civica Cx Housing supports the creation of different consent types, which facilitate the overarching classification of authorisations sought from a contact e.g. the permission pertains to internal processing, the data is to be shared with contractors for the fulfilment of a repair, or passed to partner agencies for the purpose of debt recovery and any associated legal proceedings, etc. Delivered through a custom-defined parameter, all consent types can be easily categorised into sub-classifications, such as personal data, repairs data, medical data, financial records, etc. Each consent request must be supported by an outcome, qualifying whether or not permission has been granted by the tenant. At elementary level, the possible outcome states for an individual's consent are Granted, Refused or Other - referred to as the master outcome codes - and these can be mapped onto any number of custom values that reflect the data compliance measures implemented by the housing organisation.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of information management consent maintenance, including: