Global Industry Groups Urge European Parliament to vote in favour of EU-UK Adequacy Decisions

11 May 2021 – The global business community that our organisations jointly represent is disappointed by the negative vote on the draft EU-UK adequacy decisions in the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE Committee) on 10 May.

The European Commission’s proposal to grant adequacy to the UK recognises that the UK currently ensures an essentially equivalent level of protection to the one guaranteed under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Law Enforcement Directive (LED). The UK has a data protection regime that is and has been deemed essentially equivalent to the EU’s, having itself adopted the GDPR ahead of leaving the EU. Important safeguards including the continued monitoring of the UK’s privacy legislation would be installed by the adequacy decisions.

Ahead of the plenary vote on 20 May, the undersigned organisations respectfully urge the European Parliament to recognise the high standard of the UK’s data protection regime, as well as the impressive work done by the European Commission, the European Data Protection Board, and the Member States in striving for a timely adoption of the draft adequacy decisions by the end of May. This will be critical to ensure that a new agreement is in place before the bridging mechanism in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement expires at the end of June – which in turn will allow personal data to continue to flow seamlessly between the EU and the UK. The negative consequences of an interruption in data flows would be substantial to businesses in the UK and EU, given the EU remains the UK’s main trading partner and EU exports to the UK in 2019 alone amounted to approximately €430 billion.

We also trust that a successful EU-UK process serves as a benchmark for other ongoing and future adequacy decisions, including negotiations for an EU-US Privacy Shield successor agreement.

Signatories

Download the full statement here.