What do you need to comply with UK law?
When you are calling people in the UK you need to ensure that you are following ALL the relevant laws. Including:
Data Protection Act;
General Data Protection Regulations;
Communications Act 2003;
Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations
To most people these will be confusing and full of too much information, so we want to help people take what we know the requirements to be for specific regulations that you may be breaking.
The first one we see all the time is for anyone making cold calls. Cold calls are calls where you initiate contact with an individual via phone for the first time for marketing purposes. The number that you present to your prospective customers MUST be visible and not withheld. If requested you must provide an address or a Freephone number that you can be contacted on.
You can make cold calls to anyone who is not registered on the TPS or CTPS databases AND that have not stated they do not wish to be contacted by you.
There are other areas of business you are not allowed to contact individuals about, for example regarding pension schemes, unless you are authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority AND the person you are calling has explicitly consented to your calls. There are many other areas and other requirements for these areas, as such it is always best to look into this for your specific business services.
When calling individuals you need to ensure the data you are processing is directly relevant AND minimised to only what you need. Once you have done these you will need to ensure that you do a GDPR Lawful Basis check, there are several different types of Lawful Basis for Processing but the most common is Legitimate Interest. If this is how you process data you MUST ensure you have a Legitimate Interest Assessment (LIA) for each process and keep a hold of them as these may be your only proof for why you called an individual should something happen.
The ICO is a great source of information and guidance on their website Home | ICO . A particularly interesting document of theirs regarding direct marketing can be found here – Direct marketing guidance (ico.org.uk)
We hope that we have given you some guidance on compliance and given some pointers on where you can find more information to expand on the information provided.
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