Nadine Dorries promotes 'Brexit rewards' of proposed UK data protection law

2022-09-05 11:06

Getting its second reading in the House of Commons, the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill sets out how the UK plans to diverge from data protection legislation introduced during its membership of the European Union.

The legal changes would improve the UK's ability to strike international data deals and make these partnerships more secure, allowing British businesses to seize billions of pounds of data trade as a reward of Brexit, according to Dorries.

Not evident in the statement is the inconvenient fact that diverging too far from the EU's data protection regime - the General Data Protection Directive - could have consequences for UK businesses which regularly share data with units based in the EU or its economic area.

In May, legal experts told The Register UK government plans to create new data protection laws could make more work and add costs for business, while also creating the possibility of challenges to data sharing between the EU and UK. If the government's legislation ends up too different from the EU's GDPR, it could threaten the "Adequacy" ruling which currently allows data sharing between the UK and Europe's trading bloc.

"Companies with a footprint in EU and UK will not welcome proposals to diverge from GDPR. If the UK just goes on its own and tries to do something different from the EU it is going to be much more expensive for them. I don't really see that data protection officers are hungry to do something different from GDPR," Georgina Kon, technology and media partner at law firm, Linklaters said in May. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, has also warned that proposed changes to Britain's data protection rules put the adequacy ruling at risk.

"Dr Sam De Silva, chair of BCS's Law Specialist Group and a technology and data partner at international law firm CMS, said:"Any material deviation the UK adopts in relation to data protection does risk its adequacy status so I hope there will be a detailed and objective analysis undertaken to assess whether the benefits from UK's data reform outweigh the risks of not continuing to have an adequacy status.

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