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UK GDPR

The UK General Data Protection Regulation

Art. 37 GDPR Section 4 - Data protection officer

Designation of the data protection officer

The controller and the processor shall designate a data protection officer in any case where:
1. the processing is carried out by a public authority or body, except for courts acting in their judicial capacity;
2. the core activities of the controller or the processor consist of processing operations which, by virtue of their nature, their scope and/or their purposes, require regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale;
  or
3. the core activities of the controller or the processor consist of processing on a large scale of special categories of data pursuant to Article 9 or personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences referred to in Article 10.
A group of undertakings may appoint a single data protection officer provided that a data protection officer is easily accessible from each establishment.
Where the controller or the processor is a public authority or body, a single data protection officer may be designated for several such authorities or bodies, taking account of their organisational structure and size.
In cases other than those referred to in paragraph 1, the controller or processor or associations and other bodies representing categories of controllers or processors may designate a data protection officer. The data protection officer may act for such associations and other bodies representing controllers or processors.
The data protection officer shall be designated on the basis of professional qualities and, in particular, expert knowledge of data protection law and practices and the ability to fulfil the tasks referred to in Article 39.
The data protection officer maybe a staff member of the controller or processor, or fulfil the tasks on the basis of a service contract.
The controller or the processor shall publish the contact details of the data protection officer and communicate them to the Commissioner.

Corresponding Recitals

97 /uk-gdpr/recital/no-97Data Protection Officer

Where the processing is carried out by a public authority, except for courts or independent judicial authorities when acting in their judicial capacity, where, in the private sector, processing is carried out by a controller whose core activities consist of processing operations that require regular and systematic monitoring of the data subjects on a large scale, or where the core activities of the controller or the processor consist of processing on a large scale of special categories of personal data and data relating to criminal convictions and offences, a person with expert knowledge of data protection law and practices should assist the controller or processor to monitor internal compliance with this Regulation. In the private sector, the core activities of a controller relate to its primary activities and do not relate to the processing of personal data as ancillary activities. The necessary level of expert knowledge should be determined in particular according to the data processing operations carried out and the protection required for the personal data processed by the controller or the processor. Such data protection officers, whether or not they are an employee of the controller, should be in a position to perform their duties and tasks in an independent manner.

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Further Information

This version of the UK GDPR is offered purely as what we hope will be a helpful resource. It does not have the status of law, and should not be relied on as such. Nor do we guarantee it is free from errors. It was originally prepared using a Keeling Schedule made available by the UK Government.

Since then, a consolidated version has also been made available on the legislation.gov.uk pages.

By virtue of section 3 of the European Union (Withdrawal Act) 2018, the GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) was retained in United Kingdom law as "direct EU legislation". However, the effect of the Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments Etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, as amended by the Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments Etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020, was, from 1 January 2021, immediately to make changes to the retained GDPR, and to refer to it as the "UK GDPR". These pages reflect those changes.

This resource includes links to the GDPR recitals. The explanatory notes to the European Union (Withdrawal Act) 2018 confirm that where legislation is converted under section 3, it is the text of the legislation itself which will form part of domestic legislation, and this will include the full text of any EU instrument (including its recitals). Accordingly, recitals will continue to be interpreted as they were prior to the UK’s exit from the EU. They will, as before, be capable of casting light on the interpretation to be given to a legal rule, but they will not themselves have the status of a legal rule. However, it stands to reason that – as the recitals themselves have not been amended – they will in places contain language and references to EU bodies and rules which no longer apply to the UK.

In this resource we link Articles of the UK GDPR to the corresponding recitals. In deciding which recitals correspond to which Articles of UK GDPR, we have drawn on the working document of the EU GDPR which the Information Commissioner had previously published in 2017.