UK GDPR Reform – Buccaneering Britain Goads The Data Protection Bear

It was an open secret that the UK government and GDPR made uneasy bedfellows. Back in 2018, Dominic Cummings, Downing Street's former chief advisor derided the European data protection paradigm as "horrific", and looked forward to binning it. In 2020, Boris Johnson voiced his desire for a separate and independent data protection policy, and in May 2021, a deregulation task force commissioned by the Prime Minister called for the replacement of the UK GDPR (which is essentially identical to the EU GDPR) with a framework of British data rights. It therefore came as little surprise when, last week, the government issued a wide-ranging consultation on changes to the UK's data protection regime in a self-proclaimed dash for data-driven economic growth.