Personal number unlocks information

Validation, validation, validation - that's what you need when making follow-up calls to the Hull City Council call centre. Call centre staff are bound by strict rules set by the Data Protection Act, which govern what personal information they are allowed to give over the telephone.

The rules which are designed to protect customers from having their information abused by a third party, mean that call centre staff are not allowed to give updates over the telephone without some verifiable form of identification.

"Someone might have called to ask for refuse to be collected," said service development manager Ian Kirk. "They might want to ring again to see what progress has been made but our advisers are unable to tell them unless they can prove who they are." In most cases, he says, the job reference number given when they originally call the call centre's database will be enough to validate them. "At the end of every call, the caller should receive a unique reference number," said Ian. "If they don't receive one, they should ask for it. No two numbers are alike. They should then remember the number but not pass it on to anyone else who might abuse it."

Advisers are trained to take care when giving out information to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. "Someone might have complained about a noisy neighbour, for example," said Ian. "If the neighbour then rings up pretending to be that person, it can put the complainant at risk." In the same way, information would not be passed on to law enforcement agencies without a written request and council staff would have to validate their credentials by e-mail.