Scottish minister clarifies police facial-recognition approach

LFR in England and Wales

While the use of LFR by police in England and Wales – beginning with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has already 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.

However, in December 2025, the Home Office launched a 10-week consultation on the use of LFR by UK police, allowing interested parties and members of the public to share their views on how the controversial technology should be regulated.

At the start of its LFR consultation – which the Home Office is still yet to formally respond to – the department said 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 documents from individual forces to fully understand the basis for LFR use on their high streets.

Responding to Plastow, Gray said: “While the findings of the UK government’s consultation, and its formal response, are still to be published, the finer detail of any draft legislation once published will be carefully assessed by the Scottish Government in terms of their applicability to, and implications for, Scotland.”

However, despite not having even formally responded to the consultation – and before the now-dismissed judicial review case against the Met’s use of the technology had even been heard – the Home Office announced sweeping reform to UK policing in January 2026, which included significant investment into the LFR capabilities of police in England and Wales.

Computer Weekly has contacted the Home Office on two occasions about when it will publicly respond to the consultation but is yet to receive a response.

Consultation response so far

Despite this, many organisations – including regulatory bodies, civil society groups and academics – have begun posting their consultation responses online.

While a consensus is emerging around the need for clear regulatory requirements around, for example, oversight, safeguards and what constitutes proportionate use, there are also points of divergence, particularly over how high thresholds should be set for the police use of powerful biometric technologies.

For example, while some say these technologies are valid and valuable policing tools, others have argued that the level of intrusion on people’s rights means there are exceedingly few cases, if any, where they should be allowed.

However, all responses published so far agreed that, given the threats to rights presented by biometric surveillance technologies, it is not an option to continue without a dedicated legal framework.

For William Webster, the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner for England and Wales, the success of any new framework is dependent on effective oversight by “an independent regulatory body with adequate powers and resources to conduct its business and particularly to enable appropriate use of technology and to identify and sanction unlawful activities”.

He added in his consultation response that the scope for both individual and society-level harms mean voluntary self-regulator “will not be sufficient to ensure compliance with standards”, and that any new regulator “must make compliance mandatory, offer proactive oversight with an inspection and compliance regime, and be able to enact swift remedies where compliance is not evident”.

Webster also said the regulator must be empowered to publish codes of practice to operationalise the key principles of the framework, including reasonableness, proportionality and assessment of harm. 

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.