Sarah Jones said the UK government will introduce new legislation to set stronger UK government facial recognition safeguards for live facial recognition in public areas. The policing minister said the rules will set “parameters and principles” for how the technology is used, after a public consultation launched last December.
Jones said the new law would make live facial recognition use more proportionate and intelligence-led. Speaking to London, she said: “For example, if I had an outstanding parking fine, I would not expect this technology to be used for that.” She added: “We have to use it proportionately. We have to use it in an intelligence-led way.”
Sarah Jones and London
Jones said the consultation showed the public was “by and large” supportive of live facial recognition, but wanted reassurances about how it is used. She said the legislation would define what the technology can be used for, including catching wanted criminals and searching for missing people. Those limits matter because the same system can scan faces in public spaces and match them against watchlists.
The Home Office said a new independent watchdog would provide scrutiny over police use of the technology. It said the watchdog could, in extreme cases, take enforcement action against police forces to block them from using live facial recognition. That gives the new framework a practical enforcement route, rather than leaving oversight as a warning on paper.
Metropolitan Police and Big Brother Watch
The Metropolitan Police said live facial recognition was making London safer and said the technology had led to more than 3,000 arrests in the past two years. Big Brother Watch pushed back, saying the system treats everyone who walks by as a suspect by default. Jasleen Chaggar said: “The way in which facial recognition technology works is it's an indiscriminate tool which scans the face of every single person who walks by the camera.”
Chaggar also said: “And that's doing something that's fundamentally un-British, because in this country you have the presumption of innocence.” She said “thousands of people” had objected to the technology and said the government had sat on those responses for over six months. The next step is the legislation itself, which will determine how far the watchdog can go when police use live facial recognition in public.
