The leaders of techUK, the Data and Marketing Association (“DMA”), the Advertising Association, and the President of the Centre for Information Policy Leadership have written a letter calling on the Government to introduce a new ‘Data Reform for Growth Bill’ at the upcoming King’s Speech.

The letter repeats the calls from the DMA in its 10 -point manifesto published earlier in the year (and on which we commented here) not to abandon the significant work done over the years to draft the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, something the letter describes as “a well-crafted piece of legislation with broad support from all parties”. The authors urge the Government to “pick up the work already done, fine-tune, and pass [a similar piece of legislation] through Parliament”.

The letter also recommends a number of specific policy changes that the Government should introduce, including as follows:

• Reforms that clarify how data can be better used to support scientific research and technology development in both the public and private sectors, including enabling safe and secure AI training and development;
• Providing legal certainty around the use of legitimate interests as a lawful basis for processing data, particularly for strong public interest reasons such as combating crime and safeguarding children;
• Removing consent requirements for non-intrusive uses of cookies and other identifiers;
• Updating the law to enable the beneficial uptake of automated decision-making like AI, while maintaining strong safeguards, supported by ICO guidance;
• Create a more flexible international data transfers regime that will allow the UK to better manage data flows with other countries, which are critical for economic growth;
• Maintain the UK’s leadership in promoting effective, risk-based regulation that incentivises accountability and responsible behaviour, to maximise data benefits while ensuring appropriate risk management;
• Support the modernisation of the ICO, to align its organisational structure with other UK regulators, ensuring it maintains high levels of data protection in a balanced and proportionate way that supports responsible innovation and sustainable economic growth;
• Enable legislation for Smart Data Schemes to be introduced in appropriate sectors, such as finance, transport, energy, and home buying, giving British consumers access to more products and services.

Summarising their position, the authors argue that “a progressive and innovation-friendly regulatory environment that maintains strong privacy protection standards while delivering digital trust and legal certainty, will encourage economic growth, more innovative and effective public services, the easier use of data for research and public good, and greater flexibility in a more complex global environment for data transfers. This will in turn support the UK’s ambition to achieve global leadership in trusted and responsible data- driven innovation and artificial intelligence”.

To read the letter in full, click here