The UK’s Reform Party outlined plans on the evening of the 25th of August to abandon the country’s current data protection regulations, as part of a broader campaign to help small businesses, writes Politico.
Britain decided to incorporate an adapted version of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) into national law after Brexit. The Reform Party has announced that it will replace the British version of the GDPR with a lighter privacy policy, modeled on New Zealand’s approach to data protection.
Party leader Nigel Farage said that small businesses are currently struggling with “the suffocating tape of the EU,” and the package, which also includes the abandonment of the GDPR, is a “bold, common – sense rescue plan.”
Reform MP Robert Jenrick said in a statement that
the GDPR was trapping small businesses and technology companies in a web of unnecessary regulation.
He said that, years after the Brexit referendum, there would be no need to follow the ridiculous EU privacy laws that are hurting British businesses.
The EU GDPR provides for a wider range of individual rights in relation to personal data (including the “right to be forgotten”) than the New Zealand Privacy Act. However, the Reform Party stressed in an official press release that following the New Zealand model would maintain Britain’s data compliance status in the EU, as personal data would still be freely exchanged.
The European Commission only grants data compliance to countries that provide an equivalent level of data protection to the EU.
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