New laws will set “parameters and principles” for police use of live facial recognition cameras, Croydon West MP and policing minister Sarah Jones has said, replacing what she called a patchwork of piecemeal legislation.
Jones told BBC London that the legislation would set out what live facial recognition (LFR) can, or cannot, be used for, and is likely to create an independent watchdog to provide oversight. The government ran a public consultation last year, and it is now Jones’s job to set out its response to go before Parliament.
She said concerns raised about the technology were around proportionality — how far and wide it is used, and what it could become.
The technology maps a person’s unique facial features and matches them against faces on police watchlists. Cameras are usually mounted in busy high streets, and the Met says they cannot be used unless officers are in attendance in real time.
Croydon is where the story started: LFR was first trialled by the Metropolitan Police on North End in Croydon in 2023, in what is now Jones’s constituency, and it is also where the first permanent LFR cameras in Britain have been installed.
The Met points to more than 3,000 arrests in the past two years, which it says are making London safer, and says the way it operates the technology has been assessed as accurate and fair by the National Physical Laboratory. Following the pilot in Croydon, the Met is planning to expand its use of static LFR cameras to the West End and Soho next month.
Human rights campaigners have described the permanent Croydon installation as an alarming escalation, and have lobbied for legislation defining how police use the cameras. The cameras were first trialled under a previous government, which provided no legislative guidelines for police use of the tool.
The legislation, when it comes, will therefore settle a question that has been open since the first trials: not whether police can use facial recognition, but under what rules, with what oversight, and for which purposes.
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