In the run-up to last year’s General Election, the campaigning group The Good Law Project (GLP) actively encouraged people to make subject access requests (under Article 15 of the UK GDPR) to political parties, and they say that they enabled 13,000 people to do so.
The GLP says that the Reform Party “replied to hardly anyone”, and as a result it is bringing the first ever case in the UK under Article 80(1) of the UK GDPR, whereby a data subject (or subjects) mandates an representative organisation to bring an Article 79 claim on their behalf.
Helpfully, the GLP has published both its own particulars of claim, and, now, Reform’s defence to the claim. The latter is particularly interesting, as its initial approach is to threaten to apply to strike out the claim on the grounds that the GLP does not meet the criteria for a representative body, as laid out in section 187 of the Data Protection Act 2018.
Given the nature of the two parties (one a bullish campaign group, the other a bullish political party) it seems quite likely that this will proceed to trial. If so, we should get some helpful clarification on how Article 80(1) should operate.
The views in this post (and indeed most posts on blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
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