Earlier this week the House of Lords and the House of Commons completed their game of ping pong with the Data Protection Bill and it completed its journey through the Parliamentary procedure; a journey which began when the Bill was introduced to the House of Lords by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in September 2017. Almost eight months later, and after quite a bit of amendment, the Bill has now received Royal Assent to become the Data Protection Act 2018.
It is expected that the various pieces of secondary legislation which are required to bring the Act into force and make transitional provisions will be signed by a Minister in the DCMS later today or tomorrow to ensure that the Act comes into force on Friday.
The new Data Protection Act 2018 does a number of things: (1) it deals with those areas within the GDPR, such as exemptions, which have been left to Member States to deal with individually; (2) applies the GDPR (with appropriate medications) to areas which are not within the competence of the European Union; and (3) gives effect to the Law Enforcement Directive (which should have been in place by the 6th May 2018, but better late than never).
Data Protection law has become much more complex than was the case under the Data Protection Act 1998; it requires individuals to look in many more places to get a proper handle upon what the law requires (and that’s before we start to get decisions from the European and domestic courts).
There has been an indication by some campaign groups that there might be an early challenge to the immigration exemption within the Bill which will have an impact upon the information that data subjects can obtain from the Home Office under the subject access provisions within the GDPR. It will certainly be interesting to see whether such a challenge is in fact made and what the outcome of it is – and of course, we will cover any decision on that point should one be made by a court.
If you require further information in relation any data protection or privacy law concern then please do contact Alistair Sloan on 0141 229 0880 or by E-mail. You can also follow our dedicated information law account on twitter for news and updates concerning data protection, privacy and freedom of information.