John Edwards, the United Kingdom’s new Information Commissioner, provided reassurance to his audience of mainly company privacy lawyers and managers that the transition to the UK’s new data protection law “will be as seamless and painless as possible.” Speaking at an IAPP event in London on 23 March, he said that the business sector is increasingly aware that “data is the largest asset that does not appear on the balance sheet.”(1) This is a factor which certainly comes to the fore in merger and acquisition scenarios. It is for the Government and Parliament to set new rules and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is committed to maintaining the UK’s adequacy status from the EU. He continued to say that “people want certainty to what the law is as well as to what it might become.”