MPs Urge Restrictions On Police Using Live Facial Recognition
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
8 min read
Live facial recognition cameras have been used by police for years. With a government consultation on the way, MPs and campaigners are demanding safeguards on the technology, reports Noah Vickers
Shaun Thompson was on his way home from work in February last year when he was stopped by the police outside London Bridge station.
The 39-year-old was told by officers he was a wanted man – though they did not make clear what he was wanted for. Asked to provide fingerprints, he refused to do so. He was allowed to go only after about 30 minutes and once he had shown officers a photo of his passport.
Thompson had been misidentified by a camera using live facial recognition (LFR), which he has since described as “stop and search on steroids”. It is a revolutionary form of surveillance technology that has gradually been deployed by police forces across the country over the last decade.
First trialled by the Metropolitan Police back in 2016, no official statistics are published as to how many times it has been used nationwide. Nor is it clear exactly how many forces are using it regularly, though the Home Office this summer announced it was providing funding for 10 LFR-equipped vans to be shared between seven forces – including some which have not used it before, such as West Yorkshire police.
LFR works by setting up a live camera feed, usually on a busy thoroughfare, and scanning people’s faces. Each of those faces is compared by the software against a watchlist of people the police are looking for, perhaps because they’re suspected of committing a crime, or because they’ve been reported missing.
If it identifies a face which looks similar enough to anyone on that watchlist, it generates an alert to police officers on the scene, who will stop that individual to confirm whether they are the person the system believes they might be.
Faces that do not return a positive match are typically deleted in less than a second. For some of LFR’s critics, however, this is of little reassurance – they argue that scanning someone’s face when they are not accused of wrongdoing is a threat to privacy.
Despite fears over LFR’s potential to erode civil liberties, there is no dedicated legislation setting out how exactly police can use the technology.
In theory, LFR is instead governed by existing data protection, equality and human rights laws. In practice, the most direct set of instructions for police forces comes in the form of a guidance document published by the College of Policing – prompting concerns that officers are “marking their own homework”.
Until a Westminster Hall debate in November last year, tabled by the former culture secretary John Whittingdale, LFR had never been debated in detail by MPs.
“It is pretty extraordinary, in a way, that mine has been the only debate which has taken place in Parliament,” the Conservative MP for Maldon tells The House.
“This is an enormous development taking place – which I’m not against – but which is happening without any kind of discussion or oversight as to the safeguards that I think everybody would agree need to be put in place.”
At a time when police budgets are stretched, LFR is an attractive tool for constabularies, as it can identify many more persons of interest than officers can. According to Met police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, by early September LFR had assisted his officers in making more than 700 arrests since the start of this year, including 50 registered sex offenders in breach of their conditions.
But, still, some find it troubling.
This is the equivalent of being finger-printed when you go down to the shops
“A lot of people see it as just like a CCTV camera,” says Charlie Whelton, policy and campaigns officer at the advocacy group Liberty. “The way that we think about this technology is that it’s much more like a checkpoint. Like if you’re crossing the border at an airport, you provide your identification – state your identity – in order to carry on… This is the equivalent of being finger-printed when you go down to the shops.”
By its very nature, Whelton argues, LFR undermines the long-held principle of citizens being innocent until proven guilty.
“If you’re walking down your high street, something pings in a van and suddenly you’ve got a load of police officers coming over and grabbing you, saying ‘you are so and so’, that’s a terrifying experience,” he says. “It’s that flipping of the burden of proof – you’ve got to prove that you’re innocent, in that case.”
There are also concerns over the technology’s accuracy and suggestions that it disproportionately misidentifies people with darker skin – a point raised in last year’s debate by Labour MPs Kim Johnson, Dawn Butler and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.
These concerns are linked to the fact that LFR’s sensitivity level can be altered by police forces, with zero being the most sensitive threshold and one the least sensitive. If set at a more sensitive level, the system will identify more matches among the faces it is scanning, but with a higher potential bias on racial, gender and age grounds.
LFR’s supporters point to a 2023 report by the National Physical Laboratory, which found that there was no statistically significant bias if the system is set at 0.6 or higher. But a leading expert on the technology, Professor Pete Fussey, has argued that this conclusion had only a “weak statistical basis” behind it, as it was based on an analysis of only seven false matches.
And without any direct legislation governing the use of LFR, police are technically free to set the system’s sensitivity to any level they wish.
In August, the government confirmed it would launch a consultation “in the autumn to seek views on when and how the technology should be used… to ensure transparency and public confidence”.
The results “will help the government to shape a new legal framework” – though it is unclear whether that will mean passing new, dedicated legislation on LFR, or relying on existing laws.
In the absence of new legislation, police forces have faced legal challenges over how they are using LFR within the existing human rights framework. Thompson – the man misidentified outside London Bridge station – has been granted permission for a judicial review into the Met’s use of the technology. The case is due to be heard in the High Court in January 2026.
In a submission ahead of that hearing, the Equality and Human Rights Commission said it believed the Met’s current LFR policy is incompatible with the rights to privacy and freedom of assembly and association – which the Met denies.
Any consultation must not be a cover for expanding surveillance powers
If reforms to the law are coming, the UK would not have to look far for examples of how the technology has been regulated overseas. In 2024, the European parliament passed tight restrictions on LFR through its Artificial Intelligence Act.
“When the EU had this debate, and properly looked at this, they put the bar incredibly high,” says Green MP Siân Berry. “There is no way the current police use of LFR [in the UK]… would conform with what the EU decided after a proper, mature debate about what legislation there should be.
“So, what I want is actual laws to be passed, and for it not to be simply a consultation.”
Labour MP Kim Johnson agrees that the pledge to consult with the public “doesn’t go nearly far enough”, as LFR “is already being used by police in public spaces without proper oversight – and its selective deployment raises serious questions about who is being targeted by the expansion of the surveillance state and why”.
She adds: “Any consultation must not be a cover for expanding surveillance powers. We need strict limits, independent oversight, and full transparency.”
Liberty is arguing for a system in which police forces wanting to use LFR at a particular time and place would have to apply for a warrant – only granted under exceptional circumstances – from an independent body of commissioners, following the model established under the Investigatory Powers Act.
Without robust safeguards put in place, Whittingdale fears that “a more authoritarian government” – potentially aided by the database of a digital ID system – could in future use LFR to track people’s movements.
“If you get into the realms of dystopian science fiction, or indeed spy films, where it’s used the whole time to track people – that’s not the reality, but we are at a point where it could now be,” the MP says.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Live facial recognition is a crucial tool to keep the public safe by helping the police to locate offenders, with many serious criminals already brought to justice through its use.
“Police forces using this technology are required to comply with existing legislation governing its use, as well as their human rights and equality obligations. We will launch a public consultation to develop a bespoke new legal framework for law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology.”
Lindsey Chiswick, facial recognition technology lead at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said: “While we recognise there will always be a range of views when it comes to the use of any new technology, polling by a number of different organisations shows that the majority of the public support police use of facial recognition…
“We work closely with the national police chief scientific adviser and local ethics panels to ensure we are abiding by the highest ethical standards. Oversight is provided by police and crime commissioners and mayors, in addition to the Information Commissioner’s Office and other regulatory bodies.”
