UK Government defends immigration exemption to data law
From: The Law Society Gazette
Ministers have defended their proposal to exempt the Home Office from a key part of the data protection regime despite concerns raised by the legal profession. Culture secretary Matt Hancock MP told the House of Commons yesterday that exemptions from subject access requests are necessary to ensure that ’a minority of individuals cannot abuse data protection law with the sole intent of undermining immigration controls’.
Hancock was opening the second reading in the Commons of the Data Protection Bill, which will implement and extend the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force under EU law on 25 May. The Bar Council is among several legal bodies to warn that a provision allowing the Home Office to refuse to answer requests for data about an individual in immigration cases could put lives at risk.
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