The delay spells bad news for companies trying to ensure they are in compliance with the new regulations and puts further pressure on the ICO to deliver clear and unambiguous guidelines on the introduction of GDPR.

The ICO originally claimed the GDPR guidance would be in place for June 2017, but industry sources now say they not appear before December. This would leave companies less than five months to carry out all of the necessary plans to achieve compliance.

This follows calls from several organisations for greater clarity from the ICO, claiming that the GDPR guidance released so far has been ambiguous.

There are fears that the lack of progress from the ICO will lead to companies delaying their preparations for GDPR, leaving UK businesses unprepared for the major changes the regulations will impose.

This news follows the release of the ICO’s first ever international strategy which sets out the organisation’s main international concerns over the next four years.

A spokesperson for the ICO told Decision Marketing: “We’re currently waiting for the Article 29 Working Party to release its consent guidance. Once this has happened, our guidance will follow.”

The next meeting of the group is not scheduled to take place until September 2017.

Organisations are already running into problems based upon the imminent changes. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) recently stated that it regretted changing it’s opt-in strategy so early, after working with the ICO to work towards GDPR compliance. Pub chain Wetherspoons recently deleted its entire customer e-mail list stating: “We felt, on balance, that we would rather not hold even email addresses for customers. The less customer information we have, which now is almost none, then the less risk associated with data.”