Who we are?
The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Regional Adoption Agency is part of Cambridgeshire County Council. We provide the adoption services for Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council. Peterborough City Council can delegate its functions to Cambridgeshire County Council under S. 101 (1)(b) Local Government Act 1972 and Regulation 5 of the Local Authorities (Arrangements for the Discharge of Functions) (England) Regulations SI 2012/1019 which provides that a local authority may delegate their functions to another local authority.
The Regional Adoption Agency provides a range of service to children and their families including children who are requiring an adoptive placement, supporting those caring for children in a permanent placement as well as the birth families for those children who are placed for adoption. Here is an overview of our services.
Recruitment, assessment, and approval of adopters
we support prospective adopters from the start of their interest in adoption with their initial enquiry, completing the assessment process to enable them to be approved as adoptive parents. The team continue to support the prospective adopters with identifying the children they wish to adopt, enabling the children to move in and until they become the sole legal parents for the children though an Adoption Order.
Family Finding
A key activity of the Regional Adoption Agency is ensuring children are successfully linked with their forever family as early as possible. Dedicated Family Finding social workers will have developed a detailed knowledge of the child throughout their time in local authority care to ensure that the child’s adoptive family can identified and linked as soon as adoption is the plan for the child.
Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Team
The team provides support to adopters, special guardians, and their children to enable them to make positive changes to challenges that they face throughout their childhood and beyond. Their approach is routed in developmental trauma and attachment. They work with a range of stakeholders to provide a child-centred comprehensive approach grounded by the evidence base.
What information do we hold
We collect and processes personal information about children and prospective/confirmed adopters. This will include but not be limited to:
- Personal details, including dates and places of birth, gender, sexual orientation, homes addresses
- family circumstances and relationships,
- identified difficulties or relevant health needs
- details of plans for support and the people involved in these
- records of discussions with or visits made to families and information about their contact with us, such as attendances at groups or courses
- records of discussions about you that we have with other people as part of your support
Why do we hold it?
We use your personal information for the following purposes:
- To facilitate your adoption enquiry;
- In the assessment process;
- Subject to approval; in the family finding process in partnership with Local Authorities and Regional Adoption Agencies;
- Subject to the child’s care being adoption: in the family finding process in partnership with Local Authorities and Regional Adoption Agencies;
- Supporting adoptive families pre and post adoption order;
- To keep you updated with relevant workshops, conferences and/or training sessions;
- We will not pass on your details to anyone else without your express permission except in exceptional circumstances such as reporting serious self-harm or posing a threat to others, or children contacting us and sharing serious issues such as physical abuse or exploitation;
- For the purpose of monitoring, statistical reporting and benchmarking we will share anonymised data with 3rd parties such as CVAA (Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies) and Central Government bodies.
Under data protection legislation, we have to identify a lawful basis for processing both personal data and special category data. Both councils have statutory duties in regards to adoption from the following pieces of legislation; Adoption Support Services Regulations 2005, Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005 and Adoption and Children Act 2002 to match and place for adoption as well as support children, adopters and birth families. This means that our lawful basis is Article 6 (1) (e) of the UK GDPR. Our lawful basis for processing special category data is Article 9 (2) (g) with a condition of Sch 1 Part 2 (6) as part of the council’s statutory duties or where appropriate Article 9(2) (h) the provision of social care.
Who do we collect information from?
This information is gathered from children, young people, prospective and confirmed adopters, their family members and other professionals who know them. We need this information in order to provide you with services you have requested, have consented to receive or that we are required by law to provide you with.
Who we share with
As Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Adoption works in partnership with Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council, information we collect will be shared with them to provide the agreed services. However, we may also be required to share your information with other external agencies who may be involved in the adoption process.
When you are receiving a service from us we will share information with other agencies where this will enable us to provide you with the best support possible. You should be made aware of who we are sharing information with as part of your support. Depending on circumstances the agencies we might share information about you include but bit limited to:
- other local Regional Adoption Agencies.
- Other local authorities,
- services that are working with you and your family.
We will not give information about you to anyone outside the councils without your consent unless required to do so by law, to deliver our statutory functions, or to deliver the services which you have requested. We do have a legal duty to collect, process and share information with our partners where this is necessary to prevent harm to a child or to prevent a crime.
If you ask us not to share information we will always try to respect your wishes but in some circumstances this may limit the services we can offer you.
How long do we keep information for?
This will be based on either a legal requirement (where a law says we have to keep information for a specific period of time) or accepted business practice. Adoption records are usually kept for at least 100 years.
Your Rights
Under Data Protection Legislation you have the following rights:
- Right of access (to receive a copy of your personal data)
- Right to rectification (to request data is corrected inaccurate)
- Right to erasure (to request that data is deleted)
- Right to restrict processing (to request we don’t use your data in a certain way)
- Right to data portability (in some cases, you can ask to receive a copy of your data in a commonly-used electronic format so that it can be given to someone else)
- Right to object (generally to make a complaint about any aspect of our use of your data)
- Right to have explained if there will be any automated decision-making, including profiling, based on your data and for the logic behind this to be explained to you.
Any such request can be submitted to the Data Protection Officer. Whether we can agree to your request will depend on the specific circumstances and if we cannot then we will explain the reasons why.
If you are unhappy with any aspect of how your information has been collected and/or used, you can make a complaint to the Data Protection Officer.
You can also report your concerns to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
To contact our Data Protection Officer
Email: Data.protection@cambridgeshire.gov.uk
Phone: 01223 699137.
Write to: Data Protection Officer, Information and Records Team, OCT1224, Cambridgeshire County Council, Shire Hall, Cambridge, CB3 0AP
