Farage's Reform UK plans to scrap UK version of GDPR

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LONDON — Reform UK on Tuesday night outlined plans to scrap the U.K.’s data protection regime as part of a broader package of measures designed to help small businesses.

The U.K. decided to incorporate an amended version of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy laws into British law post-Brexit. Reform UK says it would replace the U.K. version of GDPR with a “light-touch” privacy law modeled on New Zealand’s approach to data protection.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said small businesses have had to deal with “suffocating EU red tape” and the package, which includes abolishing GDPR, is a “bold, common-sense rescue plan.”

“[T]he GDPR has strangled small businesses and tech firms alike in a web of unnecessary regulation … Ten years after the Brexit referendum we should not still be following ridiculous EU privacy laws that hurt British businesses,” Reform UK MP Robert Jenrick said in a statement.

The EU GDPR provides for a wider set of individual rights around personal data (including the “right to be forgotten”) than New Zealand’s Privacy Act does.

However, Reform UK stressed in its press release that following the New Zealand model would preserve the U.K.’s EU data adequacy status, meaning personal data would still be allowed to flow freely between the U.K. and EU.

The European Commission only grants adequacy to countries that provide an essentially equivalent level of data protection to that of the EU.

The U.K. has already diverged from Brussels on privacy laws with the passage of the Data (Use and Access) Act last year, which relaxed some aspects of the U.K. GDPR in a bid to boost economic growth.