Belinda Doshi, partner at law firm Nabarro, said that the government's lack of compliance with the new directive did not send a good message to the private sector.

"Many businesses will quite rightly ask, why have they spent time and money on cookie compliance when the government hasn't?"

"This sends a very poor message to business that government is happy to agree and implement new EU regulation, but does not intend itself to comply with it," she said.

Smith was, however, keen to highlight that although that the moratorium period has come to an end, this did not mean that the ICO was going to launch a "torrent of enforcement action".

"What it really means is those complaints about websites that don't get consent for cookies will now go into the normal processes we would take in assessing whether to use our enforcement powers," explained Smith.