This disclosure statement explains how the personal information collected by both Tūwharetoa Settlement Trust and He Iwi Kāinga (‘we’ ‘us’, ‘our’) in connection with the provision of our housing services, how this information is collected and with whom it may be shared.
In addition to this disclosure statement, we may, on occasion, provide you with specific statements about how we use and disclose particular information that we collect from (including through our website) and seek your authorisation or consent if necessary.
To enable us to provide our housing services to you, we will need to collect personal information about you and your family.
What we collect
The information we may collect includes:
- Information you and/or your family provide to us, or the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) or other referral agency when applying for our housing services.
- Additional information we, or MSD, or another agency, may ask you and/or your family to provide, to assist us to identify suitable housing solutions for you and your family.
- Information about your rent payments and any debts you might have incurred with your housing provider.
- Information recorded during phone calls, and meetings or in emails and other correspondence we have with you and/or your family.
- Information provided to us by other agencies (such as Housing New Zealand) for the purpose of providing you and/or your family with housing services.
- Information provided to us by other people or entities when you authorise us to collect information from those people or entities.
Why we collect information
We collect personal information about you and your family so that we can:
- Design and deliver housing services that meet the needs of you and your family.
- Inform contracted service providers who are working on our behalf to provide services in connection with the provision of housing and other services we may provide to you and your family.
- Respond to your enquiries or requests for information or assistance.
- Arrange payment of the income related rent subsidy (IRRS) if you are eligible.
- Help our partners to efficiently deliver housing services for our Tūwharetoa community.
- Develop and evaluate the He Iwi Kāinga Programmes better for you, at which point we will seek your consent.
- Provide you with information about our services or events, or the services or events of our related entities; *other agencies: or of others involved with Tūwharetoa He Iwi Kāinga Programmes, that we think may be of interest to you.
You are not required to give information to us, but if you do not provide all the information we require, we may be unable to provide social housing assistance and other services you may request from us to you and your family.
Who we share information with
We may share the information we gather with:
- Authorised staff of our related entities*
- Central and local government agencies and other organisations that we partner with or contract to deliver housing services to you.
- Service providers, and the personnel of service providers, who we contract to assist us with our operations and/or to deliver services to you on our behalf, for the purpose of providing those services, such as our maintenance provider.
Information we gather may also be used or disclosed in a form where individuals are not identified, or it may be used for statistical or research purposes where the information will not be published in a form that could reasonably be expected to identify the individual concerned.
We are sometimes required to provide information about you and your family to law enforcement agencies such as the Police but only in response to a lawful request from these agencies.
How we keep your information safe
The information you give to us, or our contracted service providers is collected and will be held by He Iwi Kāinga and/or our contracted service providers.
We keep your information safe by:
- Storing it securely in our offices or in secure computer data centres.
- Restricting access to your information and only allowing access to it by authorised staff for the purpose of delivering housing and related services to you and your family, and any other services that you may require from us or our related entities. *
We keep your information only for as long as it is required for the purposes for which we may lawfully use the information. After this period, we destroy the information by securely erasing it.
Request to see your information
Under the Privacy Act 2020 you have the right to ask for personal information we hold about you. Where the information is readily retrievable; we will provide you with confirmation of whether or not we hold the information, and you can request a copy of the information. You also have the right to ask for personal information we hold about you to be corrected if you think it is wrong. If you would like to ask for a copy of your information, or to have it corrected, please contact us.