Part 7: Miscellaneous and general Section 77: Guidance about the disclosure of information by police forces
This section requires the Secretary of State (in practice, the Home Secretary) to issue statutory guidance to the police about the disclosure of police information by police forces for the purposes of preventing domestic abuse, that is about the exercise of their functions under the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme ("DVDS"), commonly referred to as "Clare’s Law". Such guidance is currently issued on a non-statutory basis (see paragraph 60 above).
	Subsection (2) requires chief officers of police to have regard to any guidance issued under this section. This means that the police must take the guidance into account during the exercise of their functions under the DVDS and that, if they decide to depart from the guidance, they must have good reasons for doing so.
	Subsection (4) sets out with which parties the Secretary of State must consult before issuing or revising guidance under this section.
	Subsection (6) provides that any guidance issued or revised under this section must be published.
	Topics which the Government would expect to be covered in such statutory guidance include:
Recommended minimum levels of knowledge and experience required by practitioners to discharge their functions under the DVDS effectively;
Suggested step-by-step processes and timescales for the two disclosure routes under the scheme (the "right to ask" and the "right to know"), including example scenarios for each route;
Minimum standards of information to be obtained from the applicant;
Minimum standards of intelligence checks to be completed;
Guidance on effective engagement with a multi-agency forum such as a Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conference to inform decision-making;
Guidance on robust risk assessment and safety planning in order to safeguard the individual or individuals potentially at risk of domestic abuse;
Suggested types of information which may be disclosed under the scheme, such as details of allegations, charges, prosecutions and convictions for relevant offences;
Guidance on what constitutes a "reasonable and proportionate" disclosure in line with relevant human rights and data protection legislation and the 1974 Act; and
Suggested forms of wording for communicating outcomes at each stage of the DVDS process.