Data Protection – your guide to compliance

Managing employee records in a way that is compliant with the Data Protection Act is one of the more difficult issues in ensuring that HR practices are aligned with legal requirements. There are major implications for a whole range of HR activities, including recruitment, equality monitoring and sickness and absence recording.

This HR Compliance Guide to Data Protection is the first in a new series of publications from IDS. It provides a clear and succinct explanation of the data protection rules and focused guidance on the steps to ensure that your organisation is moving towards compliance.

In order to help you assess the issues and formulate a strategy for dealing with some of the more difficult areas of employee relations and law, IDS has devised HR Compliance Guides. The Guides help you make the leap from understanding the law to putting its principles into practice within your organisation. They contain analysis, checklists and advice on the best way to move forward in areas that can leave organisations bogged down in the detail of legislation. They provide useful guidance on how actually to ensure that policies and practice are in compliance.

The HR Compliance Guide to Data Protection not only gives you a clear explanation of the legal rules, but also reviews each of the key areas of record keeping. In each section the guide explains when the Act applies, followed by an analysis of the key risk areas and a compliance checklist, setting out steps that your organisation can take for proper handling of each type of information.

This HR Compliance Guide is aimed at giving you both questions and answers. It is an essential aid for anyone with responsibility for data protection issues.

Published August 2004

Data Protection – contents