Page 20 - Part B

Information, Advice or Guidance

Definitions

Legislation means a law, or set of laws, made by the government. In our case, there
are a number of laws which relate to signposting or referrals; one that has been
examined previously is the Data Protection Act (DPA). The laws relating to signposting
and referrals mostly relate to confidentiality and ensuring you act in the client’s best
interest.

Codes of practice are a set of written rules, explaining how someone in a certain
profession should behave. For example, a debt advisor will have a code of practice
stating how they should behave when dealing with a client. These are normally set by
the governing body for that organisation.
Ethical requirements are a set of rules which are based around what people think is
right and wrong; again, these are normally set by a governing body. These are normally
not laws, but a set of rules to abide by.

Legislation, codes of practice and ethical requirements in
practice

When signposting or referring a client, you need to ensure that you are doing so within
the legal framework. In particular, the law which governs signposting and referrals is
the Data Protection Act.

The Act contains three key strands. These deal with:

• Notification by a data controller to the Information Commissioner

• Compliance with the eight data protection principles

• Observing the rights of data subjects.

The first strand of the act relates to a person within the organisation who is in charge
of clients’ information. Their job is to explain how and why personal information is
needed and what the organisation plans to do with it. The Information Commissioner
is the government-appointed individual who ensures that the organisation is using
personal information appropriately. For example, ensuring that a debt charity uses
the client’s information to refer them to the council for housing needs and does not
provide the client’s information to another company for a fee.

18