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Home Office launches police facial recognition consultation

The Home Office has formally opened a 10-week consultation on a legal framework for police use of facial recognition technologies, and will consider extending any new rules to police deployments of other biometric and inferential technologies

Sebastian Klovig Skelton
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Published: 04 Dec 2025 14:30

The Home Office has formally opened a consultation on the use of facial recognition by UK police, saying the government is committed to introducing a legal framework that sets out clear rules for the technology.

Initially announced by policing minister Sarah Jones in early October 2025, the 10-week consultation will allow interested parties and members of the public to share their views on how the controversial technology should be regulated.

While the use of live facial recognition (LFR) by police – beginning with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has ramped up massively in recent years, there has so far been minimal public debate or consultation, with the Home Office claiming for years that there is already “comprehensive” legal framework in place.

The Home Office has now said that although a “patchwork” legal framework for police facial recognition exists (including for the increasing use of the retrospective and “operator-initiated” versions of the technology), it does not give police themselves the confidence to “use it at significantly greater scale … nor does it consistently give the public the confidence that it will be used responsibly”.

It added that the current rules governing police LFR use are “complicated and difficult to understand”, and that an ordinary member of the public would be required to read four pieces of legislation, police national guidance documents and a range of detailed legal or data protection documentation from individual forces to fully understand the basis for LFR use on their high streets.

The Home Office further added that it will consider whether any new framework would also cover the police use of “other biometric and inferential technologies”, including voice and gait recognition, as well as emotion detection algorithms that can “help police spot behaviour associated with criminal activity” or identify suicidal intent in members of the public.

“Although police use of facial recognition has prompted the government to examine the law in this area, other technologies with similar characteristics pose similar questions, such as in what circumstances can their use be justified?” it said. “This consultation therefore asks more broadly about principles that could be applied to a wider range of technologies, which all have the potential to interfere with people’s rights.”

Legislative regime

However, the Home Office noted that “any covert (secret) uses of these types of technology would be subject to a strict legislative regime, notably in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000”, and are therefore not part of the consultation.

The Home Office has said that any new laws informed by the consultation would take about two years to be passed by Parliament.

Responding to the consultation launch, human rights group Liberty – which won the first legal challenge against police use of the tech in August 2020 – urged the government to halt the expansion of police facial recognition while the consultation is taking place, and specified the types of safeguards it believes would protect the public.

This includes ensuring there is independent sign-off before facial recognition is used, limiting its uses to preventing imminent threats to life, searching for missing persons and only searching for people suspected of committing serious offences.

Liberty added that the police should be forced to give at least 14-days advance warning of live facial recognition deployments, except when there is an urgent need to do otherwise. “The public is finally getting a chance to have its say on this surveillance tech, but it’s disappointing the Home Office is starting a consultation with a pledge to ramp up its use,” said Liberty director Akiko Hart.

“Facial recognition cameras are powerful pieces of new technology that enable the police to track and monitor every one of us while we go about our day-to-day lives,” she said. “Police forces have been able to make up their own rules for too long – and just this week we learned these cameras have been used to target children as young as 12.

“The government must halt the rapid roll-out of facial recognition technology, and make sure there are safeguards in place to protect each of us and prioritise our rights – something we know the public wants.”

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Nuala Polo, UK public policy lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute, added that while the consultation is welcome, focusing solely on policing risks creates dangerous regulatory gaps that leave people unprotected.

“Private companies are already deploying biometric technologies like FRT and fingerprint scanning in retail chains, workplaces and schools,” she said. “Meanwhile, a new generation of equally invasive biometrics are being rolled out in public spaces to infer people’s emotions, intentions and attention – despite low levels of scientific validity.

“Any forthcoming legislation must encompass the full spectrum of biometrics, not just police use of FRT, to ensure these powerful technologies are used safely and proportionately.”

There have been repeated calls from both Parliament and civil society over many years for the police’s use of facial recognition to be regulated.

This includes three separate inquiries by the Justice and Home Affairs Committee into shoplifting, police algorithms and police facial recognition; two of the UK’s former biometrics commissioners, Paul Wiles and Fraser Sampson; an independent legal review by Matthew Ryder QC; the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission; and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which called for a moratorium on live facial recognition as far back as July 2019.

More recently, the Ada Lovelace Institute published a report in May 2025 that said the UK’s patchwork approach to regulating biometric surveillance technologies is “inadequate”, placing fundamental rights at risk and ultimately undermining public trust.

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