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By Paul Sandle
LONDON, March 11 (Reuters) - Britain is planning to reform
data protection law to allow information to flow more freely and
drive growth in the digital economy now it has left the European
Union's orbit, Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said.
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which
came into force in 2018, was mirrored in British law following
Brexit. The EU has provisionally recognised British law as
adequate.
Dowden said Britain would not water down data protection,
but it would look for opportunities to drive growth.
"There is a sweet spot for the UK whereby we hold onto many
of the strengths of GDPR in terms of giving people security
about their data," he told reporters. "But there are obviously
areas where I think we can make more progress."
He said Britain could move faster than the EU in striking
data-sharing deals with non-EU countries.
"In our rule making, we can take a slightly less European
approach as set out in GDPR by focusing more on the outcomes
that we want to have and less on the burdens of the rules
imposed on individual businesses," he said.
Britain could diverge from Europe while keeping adequacy
with the bloc, its biggest trading partner, he said, adding that
it was not a binary choice between driving growth and
sacrificing adequacy or having adequacy and little growth.
Dowden said he would not "move precipitately" and would
draft proposals after consultation with industry.
The data proposals will be part of an agenda to use
technology to drive the economic recovery from COVID-19.
He said the rollout of gigabit broadband would accelerate
growth, and he was confident the 80% of the country that did not
require subsidy would be connected by 2025.
The government had initially allocated 1.2 billion pounds of
a total 5 billion to help fund broadband in rural areas, he
said, adding that more money could be allocated.
"The constraint is not the allocation of the capital, it's
the capacity of the (telecoms) companies to deliver on that
capital," he said.
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Toby Chopra)
