Community Micro-enterprise Kent privacy notice

We keep this privacy notice under regular review and it was last updated on 25 July 2025.

Kent County Council (KCC) respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy notice will inform you as to how we look after your personal data and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

Who we are

KCC collects, uses and is responsible for certain personal information about you. When we do so we are regulated under the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (‘UK GDPR’) and the Data Protection Act 2018. We are responsible as ‘controller’ of that personal information.

Community Micro-enterprise Kent (CME Kent) is operated by the Market Development Team, part of the Adults Commissioning Department. CME Kent helps local people to set up small enterprises and ventures (called Micro-enterprises) that can offer help within communities across Kent. This could be help within homes, social and community support, personal care and any other types of care and support to vulnerable, and/or disabled people of all ages.

Our Data Protection Officer is Benjamin Watts.

Personal information we collect and use

Information collected by us

As part of the Adults Commissioning Department, we may process the following information when we work with you, or work on a project to help ensure Adult Social Care provides the best possible care and support or service.

We may process your personal information to gather feedback about local care and support and services. We may also process your information to keep you informed of updates and opportunities to work in coproduction with us and our partners.

• personal information such as your name, address, email address, telephone number
• your image and/or voice via photograph, video or audio
• your job title, or the organisation you work for or represent
• the services you are planning to provide
• your commitment to our quality assurance processes.

How we use your personal information

We use your personal information to:

• provide you with regular updates and information
• develop content for our web pages, other adult social care literature or promotional materials
• create attendance lists at events and workshops
• raise the profile of Adult Social Care and promote example stories and case studies of best practice and to help inform best practice
• implement and maintain applicable directories for the purpose of informing the public of local groups, events and social care organisations.

We may also promote your services through presentations, print, web pages, and social media.

We will only use information that you have already consented for us to use and once the consent has expired, we will no longer use the information supplied in any future KCC Adult Social Care social media posts. However, any information already shared on social media platforms is then owned by those platforms and the data cannot be erased.

Social media

As part of our social media activity, we may use information such as videos, audio, images and case studies to build content for our posts. We will use KCC’s X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts to share this information. For more information you can read:

• X’s privacy policy
• Facebook’s privacy policy
• YouTube’s privacy notice
• Instagram’s privacy notice
• WhatsApp’s privacy notice.

Reasons we can collect and use your personal information

When we collect your personal data, we rely on the following legal bases:

• GDPR Article 6(1)(a) - the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose

How long your personal data will be kept

We will only hold your personal information for as long as necessary. The criteria for determining retention periods are statutory or other industry requirements, legal liability or other legal requirements and best business practice. We will retain your information for the year of your registration or re-registration with us plus one year. To view detail of this, refer to section AS7.2.1 of our retention schedule.

Who we share your personal information with

We may share your contact information and information about the services you offer for referral purposes with health and social care teams or with other organisations that signpost individuals to support, e.g. social work teams, placement teams, community navigation services, district councils or community voluntary organisations.

We will share personal information with law enforcement or other authorities if required by applicable law or in connection with legal proceedings.

We will share personal information with our legal and professional advisers in the event of a dispute, complaint or claim. We rely on GDPR Article 9(2)(f) where the processing of special category data is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims or whenever courts are acting in their judicial capacity.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have rights which you can exercise free of charge which allow you to:

• know what we are doing with your information and why we are doing it
• ask to see what information we hold about you (subject access request)
• ask us to correct any mistakes in the information we hold about you
• object to direct marketing
• make a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Depending on our reason for using your information you may also be entitled to:

• ask us to delete information we hold about you
• have your information transferred electronically to yourself or to another organisation
• object to decisions being made that significantly affect you
• object to how we are using your information
• stop us using your information in certain ways.

We will always seek to comply with your request however we may be required to hold or use your information to comply with legal duties. Your request may delay or prevent us delivering a service to you.

For further information about your rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, see the guidance from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) on individuals’ rights under UK GDPR.

If you would like to exercise a right, email the Information Resilience and Transparency Team at data.protection@kent.gov.uk.

Your right to withdraw your consent

Where we rely on your consent to process your personal information, you can withdraw your consent to our use of your data at any time.

You can do this by notifying the Involvement and Information Team in writing either by:

On receipt of your notification, we will stop using your information in future publications, but it may continue to appear in publications or social media posts already in circulation.

Keeping your personal information secure

We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent personal information from being accidentally lost or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your personal information to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.

Contact

Contact the Information Resilience and Transparency Team at data.protection@kent.gov.uk to exercise any of your rights, or if you have a complaint about why your information has been collected, how it has been used or how long we have kept it for.

You can contact our Data Protection Officer, Benjamin Watts, at dpo@kent.gov.uk.

UK GDPR also gives you right to lodge a complaint with Information Commissioner, who may be contacted via the Information Commissioner's website or call 03031 231113.

Read our corporate privacy statement.