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UK GDPR

The UK General Data Protection Regulation

Art. 27 GDPR Representatives of controllers or processors not established in the United Kingdom

Where Article 3(2) applies, the controller or the processor shall designate in writing a representative in the United Kingdom.
The obligation laid down in paragraph 1 of this Article shall not apply to:
1. processing which is occasional, does not include, on a large scale, processing of special categories of data as referred to in Article 9(1) or processing of personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences referred to in Article 10, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons, taking into account the nature, context, scope and purposes of the processing; or
2. a public authority or body.
[…]
The representative shall be mandated by the controller or processor to be addressed in addition to or instead of the controller or the processor by, in particular, the Commissioner and data subjects, on all issues related to processing, for the purposes of ensuring compliance with this Regulation.
The designation of a representative by the controller or processor shall be without prejudice to legal actions which could be initiated against the controller or the processor themselves.

Corresponding Recitals

80 /uk-gdpr/recital/no-80Designation of a Representative

Where a controller or a processor not established in the Union is processing personal data of data subjects who are in the Union whose processing activities are related to the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union, or to the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union, the controller or the processor should designate a representative, unless the processing is occasional, does not include processing, on a large scale, of special categories of personal data or the processing of personal data relating to criminal convictions and offences, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons, taking into account the nature, context, scope and purposes of the processing or if the controller is a public authority or body. The representative should act on behalf of the controller or the processor and may be addressed by any supervisory authority. The representative should be explicitly designated by a written mandate of the controller or of the processor to act on its behalf with regard to its obligations under this Regulation. The designation of such a representative does not affect the responsibility or liability of the controller or of the processor under this Regulation. Such a representative should perform its tasks according to the mandate received from the controller or processor, including cooperating with the competent supervisory authorities with regard to any action taken to ensure compliance with this Regulation. The designated representative should be subject to enforcement proceedings in the event of non-compliance by the controller or processor.

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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.