How to access your childhood social care records after you've left care.
If an organisation holds your personal data, according to The Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation, you have a right to see it.
If you’ve been under the care of Brighton & Hove City Council Children’s Social Work Service (BHCC CSWS), you can access your childhood social care records after you’ve left care.
You can do this by making a Subject Access Request (SAR).
You can request information from a particular period of time or event, or you can request all your files.
If you’re not sure if you were involved with Children’s Services, you can still make an SAR. We’ll tell you if we hold any information about you.
Contact the Information Rights Team to make a SAR. You can contact them by phone, email or post.
If you have a social worker, they can make the request for you.
You’ll need to provide 2 forms of ID, 1 with your photograph and 1 showing your name and current address like a bill or bank statement.
We’ll send you a form to complete with more details about your request. This will include a consent form to get permission from other people whose information may be in your SAR.
You are also welcome to fill out the form first and send it to us when making your SAR. If you would like to do that you can download a subject access request form.
You do not have to fill out this form to make an SAR. However, using this form will help the DSAR team to understand more about your request. It can help them pass the request to the correct council departments. Providing a time frame for your request also helps to make the search for information more efficient.
There is a one calendar month deadline for the council to complete an SAR. For complex cases, we can extend this by 2 months. We’ll tell you if your SAR has an extended deadline.
We’ll send you an email when we’ve started your SAR. We’ll then send you monthly updates.
We’ll send your SAR by email or by post (if you prefer).
If you were in care for many years of your childhood, your SAR may be as large as 9,000 pages. Your SAR may contain handwritten and typed documents, forms, and letters.
There may be language used in your SAR which is outdated, and not consistent with the way we record information today.
We may have to remove some information from your SAR. This would appear in the document as a redaction. We grey out any words or sentences that have been redacted from your SAR, so you will see where the information has been removed.
If you can’t get consent from third parties, we’ll remove their information.
A third-party could be a:
Where it’s reasonable to believe that you know the information already, we may not remove it. For example, the names of parents and siblings, or generic information about them.
In some cases, the Data Protection Act 2018 provides exemptions for health, social work, education, and child abuse data. If an exemption applies to information in your SAR, we may remove that data.
You can find more information about exemptions on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.
If you were in care when you were a child, you may not remember details from events in your childhood.
Your SAR may uncover, or bring back memories of, traumatic experiences and events.
We’ll tell your social worker (if you have one) that we’re completing a SAR for you. We encourage you to speak to your social worker about this. They may be able to help you prepare for the content of your SAR and be available when you receive it.
You could ask for support from a family member or friend. Letting them know that you’re going to receive your SAR can be helpful.
Your GP can also refer you to a counselling service.
Find support on the following websites:
If you’re unhappy with your SAR process, contact the Information Governance Team.
We cannot help if you’re unhappy with the content of the information in your SAR.
If you have questions about your experiences with Children’s Services, contact your social worker to discuss. If you do not have a social worker, find out how to make a complaint about children’s services.
If you have spoken to our teams and you're still unhappy with your SAR, you can request an internal review. An internal review is where someone from the team, independent of your SAR, will review the whole process your SAR went through.
They will write to you with the outcome of the internal review to tell you whether they uphold your complaint. If there is evidence of mistakes, we will correct them, and inform you of how we intend to do that.
You can also contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). They may undertake investigation on your behalf.
Other local authorities might hold records on you. Brighton & Hove City Council formed in 1997. Before that residents in Brighton were under East Sussex Council.
Council’s retention periods for keeping children’s social care records is 100 years from date of birth.
If you were a 'child in need' but did not come into care, we’ll keep your records for 25 years from your date of birth.
In cases of national public interest, or where cases resulted in changes to policy or procedure, we keep information for longer.