Privacy policy and notices

Who are we?

We are the fire and rescue service covering Kent and Medway in the United Kingdom. We provide:

• 999 response to fires and collisions on the road
• Safety advice to members of the public
• Regulation and advice to businesses with premises in Kent or Medway
• Emergency response to medical emergencies like heart attacks or trouble breathing, in partnership with South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAMb)

To provide these services, we sometimes need to collect information from you about yourself, or members of your family. We may also collect information about how you use our website and our social media services.

Why do we need your data?

There are six legal reasons we use which allow us to collect and store personal data:

• Consent: this applies if you have requested a service or information from us, and we do not have specific legal powers to provide that service anyway.
• Contract: this applies if, by providing a service, we need to enter into a contract with you. This mostly applies to the personal data of people that work for us.
• Legal duty: we may have a legal duty to provide the service.
• Vital interests: if the situation is a matter of saving a life, we may collect and pass your data to other agencies, for example, if we have provided medical assistance at an incident.
• Public task: if a task we need to perform is in the public interest but we do not have a specific legal power to enable it, but the underlying task has a clear basis in law.
• Legitimate interests: this applies where processing the data we collect is in the interests of the safety and wellbeing of everyone that works for us.

What information do we collect?

We will collect information such as your name, address, telephone number and location. We may also collect information which may be sensitive to you, such as any medical issues you may have which you think we should know about.

Privacy notices

The information we need and how we secure it for each service we provide is set out in privacy notices. Our privacy notices are provided in an accessible PDF format as noted in our Accessibility statement, but can be made available in other formats and languages on request or by using our site's accessibility toolbar.

Some privacy notices (PNs) have an associated appropriate policy document (APD). Where these are available, they are listed alongside each privacy notice.

What will we do with your information?

All the services we provide that need your personal data have a privacy notice. This sets out what data we need, why we need it, how we will store it, and what we will do with it. Once we have told you how we will use your data, we cannot usually then use it for another purpose without your permission. This is called reprocessing.

If we think we will need to share the information you provide, we will tell you with whom and why we need to share it as part of the privacy notice. If you have to right to object to us sharing your data we will tell you how.

The privacy notices we have written are being converted to web pages as time allows. We are doing this to make them accessible as possible. If you have any questions about how we process your information please contact us.

What if we get it wrong?

If you think we have mishandled any data you have provided to us, you should email the data protection officer at dataprotection@kent.fire-uk.org, or contact us by your preferred method.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you have a right of appeal. You can also contact the Office of the Information Commissioner.