Personal information collected by tenancy deposit protection providers is being used by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government ‘to gather a broader understanding of the private rented sector’.

This is admitted in new guidance, Tenancy deposit protection: privacy notice, published this week.

‘MHCLG will be collecting your personal details – name, address, contact details – alongside information relative to the legislative requirements set out in the Housing Act 2004 to protect a deposit where it is taken under an assured shorthold tenancy. This may extend to other tenures where a deposit has been protected with a tenancy deposit protection provider’, it said.

Also, ‘your data – including personal data – will be shared with:

• The Office for National Statistics, for the purposes of fulfilling its statutory functions under the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 and the Census Act 2020. Such functions limit the ONS use of the Information to the production and publication of anonymous statistics and statistical research that serve the public good.
• The Valuation Office Agency , for the purposes of fulfilling its statutory functions under the Rent Officers (Housing Benefit Functions) Order 2013 as amended, Rent Officers (Universal Credit Functions) Order 2013 as amended, Rent Act 1977 and Rent (Agriculture) Act 1976. Such uses will include operational determinations and valuations, sample frame estimation to support planning and qualitative evaluation , quality assurance and to improve knowledge of the private rental market. Processed data in the form of private rental market lettings information may be included in the rent officer data provided to the Office for National Statistics for research and statistical purposes including private rental market statistics, the Index of private housing rental prices as well as national accounts and measures of inflation.’

The guidance also includes information about how personal information is stored, and how to complain.