Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if she will publish any risk assessment undertaken on the loss or revocation of the Adequacy Agreement with the European Commission relating to data transfers from the UK to the EU and vice-versa which arise from the changes proposed in the consultation document entitled Data: a new direction.

As the Department responsible for securing adequacy from the EU, DCMS has a robust internal process for monitoring the risk of those decisions being revoked or amended. As the government made clear in the Data: a new direction consultation, we believe it is perfectly possible and reasonable to expect the UK to maintain EU adequacy as it designs a future regime.

The UK is firmly committed to maintaining high data protection standards - now and in the future. We will continue to operate a high-quality regime that promotes growth and innovation, and underpins the trustworthy use of data. EU adequacy decisions do not require an ‘adequate’ country to have the same rules, and our view is that the changes proposed in the consultation document are compatible with maintaining flows of personal data from Europe.

The UK has two EU adequacy decisions, under the General Data Protection Regulation and the Law Enforcement Directive. We recognise the importance of the EU adequacy decisions to public services, law enforcement and national security cooperation, and economic activity across a broad range of sectors. The Data: a new direction consultation included an assessment of the impact of a change in adequacy status with the EU arising as a result of proposed reforms. We will further address concerns raised about the risk to these decisions in the Government response to the consultation.