Benefits of information sharing
Effective information sharing is fundamental to supporting the development of Community Safety Partnerships' intelligence and providing an evidence base on which these partnerships can make decisions.
This decision making should then help direct appropriate responses to prevent and reduce crime, disorder and anti-social behaviour (ASB); apprehend and prosecute offenders; reduce re-offending; address issues associated with the misuse of drugs and alcohol; and enhance public reassurance and confidence in the services that are in place to improve community safety.
To tackle these issues associated with community safety requires a response that involves more than one agency. Each of these agencies collects information that relates to certain community safety problems, so in order for these problems to be understood it requires each agency to share this information.
If a certain problem is only considered from the view of a single agency then key aspects of the problem can be missed, the problem can be poorly understood or even misunderstood, resulting in decisions being made on little substance, and ineffective responses being deployed.
Myth buster on data protection
• The Data Protection Act 1998 is not a barrier to sharing
information but provides a framework to ensure that personal information is shared appropriately.
• Data protection law reinforces common sense rules of information handling. It is there to ensure personal information is managed in a sensible way.
• It helps strike a balance between the many benefits of public organisations sharing information, and maintaining and strengthening safeguards and privacy of the individual.
• It also helps balance the need to preserve a trusted
relationship between practitioner and client with the need to share information to benefit and improve the life chances of the client or protect the public.
Guidance, legislation and protocols
For more information and examples of protocols, please refer to documents below.
More details are also available on the Home Office or Information Commissioner's Office web site and links are provided on the right.