The Fundraising Regulator will next month consult the sector on changes to the Code of Fundraising Practice to bring it in line with the General Data Protection Regulation.

Speaking at Third Sector’s GDPR briefing event in central London this morning, Stephen Service, policy manager at the Fundraising Regulator, said a consultation on the proposed changes would be launched next month and would last until mid-December.

He said the watchdog would remove and replace parts of the code that were inconsistent with the stringent new data-protection rules, which are due to come into force in May.

The key changes would then be finalised, put to the regulator’s board for approval in January and published from February 2018, before the implementation of the GDPR, said Service.

He said the consultation would “cover the proposed changes and the best way to ensure the changes are communicated effectively, because it is really important to make sure that the sector as a whole knows what’s expected of it”.

He said the regulator would ensure all terminology used in the new version of the code was consistent with the GDPR and the new version would contain definitions of key terms.

“We want to make the rules on data protection more accessible, bringing them into a single section in the code, rather than where it is at the moment – all mixed up and spread out throughout the code,” he said.

The section of the new version of the code focusing on data protection would contain three sub-sections, he said, on processing, consent and legitimate interests.

In July, Gerald Oppenheim, head of policy at the Fundraising Regulator, said the GDPR would require between 50 and 60 changes to the code in order to make it compliant.