Business Rates

In order for us to collect and use your information, we have to have a legal basis for doing so. The legal basis for processing your personal information is 'our public task to deliver Business Rates services' under the :

• Lands Valuation (Scotland) Act 1854
• Valuation and Rating (Scotland) Act 1956
• Local Government (Scotland) Act 1975
• Abolition of Domestic Rates Act 1987
• Local Government Finance Act 1992
• Local Government etc. (Scotland) 1994
• Local Government and Rating Act 1997
• Local Government in Scotland Act 2003
• Non-Domestic Rates (Scotland) Act 2020

The type of personal information we collect can include:             

• name, including any previous name
• current and any previous or forwarding address 
• contact details, including phone number and email address if you have one
• date of birth
• information about other people, such as agents who act on your behalf

We may share the information provided by you with:

• other services within the council, including Council Tax, Financial Support, Finance, Licencing, Trade Waste, Payroll and Housing
• external organisations such as The Scottish Government
• third sector agencies if you have also approached or been referred to their services, such as Citizens Advice Bureau
• The Lothian Valuation Joint Board
• sheriff officer and debt collection agencies
• Edinburgh Sheriff Court
• our software suppliers to enable us to deliver this service
• Councillors, Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) and Members of the UK Parliament (MPs) if we receive a signed mandate of authority to do so.

Your personal information will not be transferred outside of the EU.

East Lothian Council is legally required to protect the public funds it administers. For this reason, your information may also be used to prevent and detect fraud, and we may share your information with other organisations responsible for auditing and administering public funds.

We retain information in our core processing system and in our document management and workflow system (which holds electronic copies of documents relevant to your rent account).

We keep your personal data in line with our data retention policy, called a Retention Schedule.  

• you have the right to be informed about how your information will be used
• you have the right to access your personal information - normally this is done by placing a Subject Access Request with the council
• you have the right to ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete information
• in certain circumstances, you have the right to have your personal information erased
• in certain circumstances you have the right to ask us to limit the ways we use or share your information
• in certain circumstances you have the right to ask us to move, copy or transfer your information to another organisation in an electronic format
• in certain circumstances you have the right to object to the ways we process your information
• in circumstances where your data is processed automatically without human intervention you have the right to certain protections

Find out more about a Subject Access Request

Find out more about data protection and your rights on the Information Commissioner’s Office website

We take your privacy seriously and would like to know about your concerns so that we can address them as soon as possible. If you wish to make a complaint, we recommend that you contact the council’s Data Protection Officer using the contact details below.

If we are unable to resolve the issue to your satisfaction, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Find more information about raising a concern with the Information Commissioner

If you have provided anyone else’s personal details, please make sure that you have told them that you have given their information to East Lothian Council.  We will only use this information for the purpose of administering Business Rates services.