Cemeteries and crematorium privacy notice

This privacy notice is designed to help you understand how we use personal information when delivering burials and cremations. We have set out the services types, the information we may use to deliver the services, who we may share it with, and how long we will keep it.

Information we hold about you

We only collect and use the minimum amount of personal information required when delivering a service to you. Wherever possible we use non-identifiable personal information.

The service may use some or all of the personal information below:

your name, address, date of birth
date of death of the deceased
any additional personal information that is necessary for us to provide you with the service that you require

We get most of this information from you, but we may also get some of this data from family members.

Why we need your information and how we use it

We use your information to:

deliver the service, or handle your query
plan and improve the services we offer
detect and prevent crime or fraud
research, however this would be in anonymised form unless we ask for your consent to use your personal information for this purpose
evidence positive outcomes to central government funding agencies
allow us to meet the legal requirements for the provision of burials, cremations and to manage, regulate and control memorials and cemetery grounds
ensure that we are able to make sure we are giving the right level of support to you

Webcasts

Blacon Crematorium is able to provide a live ‘webcast’ of services being held in order to allow those who would not otherwise have been able to attend a service to participate. This is an optional service and individuals are under no requirement to have any part of a cremation service broadcast. Where a webcast does take place, this will only be at the request of a member of the family and a service is only viewable to those who are issued with a username and password which is provided before the service. The service is recorded from a fixed point in the crematorium and will avoid unnecessarily recording attendees. No personal data of those attending or those viewing the webcast online is collected.

Ordinarily, a copy of the service can be requested by close family members. Where no request for a copy is made, any recording will be deleted after eight weeks. However, in the exceptional COVID 19 circumstances, CW7C are not accepting requests for copies of services.

Who your information may be shared with

Sometimes we may need to share your information, but we will only do so where it is necessary or required by law. We will only share the minimum information for each circumstance.

We may sometimes need to share some of your information with the Chief Officer of Police to inspect the cremation register.

The Data Controller

We are the Data Controller for this processing.

The personal information we have collected from you will be shared with fraud prevention agencies who will use it to prevent fraud and money-laundering and to verify your identity. If fraud is detected, you could be refused certain services, finance, or employment.

The lawful basis for the processing

Most of the personal information we process is provided to us directly by you, under the Data Protection Act 2018, the lawful bases we rely on for using your personal information are:

we need it to perform a public task (GDPR Article 6 (e)

When we collect data about your race, health (including biometric or genetic data), sex life, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, politics or trade union membership, we also rely on the following lawful basis:

we need to collect it for Substantial Public Interest in order to comply with UK legislation (GDPR Article 9 (2) (g)

The legislation we rely on when using your personal information to meet our legal obligations or public tasks includes but is not limited to:

Burial Act 1857
The Registration of Burials Act 1864
The Cremation Act 1902, the Cremation Act 1952
The Cremation (England & Wales) Regulations 2008
The Local Authorities Cemeteries Order 1977
The Public Health (Control of Diseases) Act 1984

You can find a list of the legislation we rely on when using your personal information to meet our legal obligations or public tasks on our legislation page.

Protecting your information

Your information will be securely stored on our network.

How long will we keep your personal information?

We will only use your personal information whilst delivering the service to you and to deal with any questions or complaints that we may receive about this, unless the law requires us to keep it for a longer period. In practice, this means that your information will be kept for five years then deleted.

Documentation regarding the lay-out of the burial space will be kept permanently and archived.

If we need to use your information for research or reports, your information will be anonymised and any information taken from notes (hand written or typed) during any consultation sessions will be securely destroyed. The information will continue to be used in a summarised and anonymised form in any research reports or papers that are published. The anonymised information in the papers may be of historic interest and may be held in public archives indefinitely

Your rights

Under data protection law, you have rights including:

your right of access - you have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information
your right to rectification - you have the right to ask us to rectify information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.
your right to restriction of processing - you have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your information in certain circumstances
your right to object to processing - you have the right to object to the processing of your personal data in certain circumstances
your right to data portability - you have the right to ask that we transfer the information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances

You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

To make a request follow the instructions on our Data protection for you page.

How to complain if you are unhappy about how your data is used

You can complain directly to our Data Protection team online or by post.

Online: Contact the DPO
By post: Data Protection Officer, The Portal, Wellington Road, Ellesmere Port, CH65 0BA

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office using the following details:

Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) website
By post: The Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
Telephone: 0303 123 1113

Will my personal information be accessible outside the UK?

Should the transfer of personal information outside of the UK become necessary, it will only take place if permitted by law, and then only where there are appropriate safeguards in place to protect the personal information.

Your information is stored within the UK.