The UK government will consult on police facial recognition before further expanding its use across England, says policing minister Sarah Jones.
Speaking during the Labour party annual conference, Jones said the government will also look to place “parameters” over how and when live facial recognition (LFR) technology can be deployed in the future.
“There has been some advice on how we use it,” she said. “But we need to go further to make sure it’s clear when it should be used and when it shouldn’t be used, to put some structure around it, because there isn’t really much of a structure around what it’s used for at the moment.” Jones added that “it’s a conversation we need to have” given the issues raised about LFR by both parliamentarians and the public.
“We just need to make sure it’s clear what it’s going to be useful for going forward, if we are going to use it more, if we do want to roll it out across the country, what are the parameters? We are going to consult over it. It is going to be very important in the future. It is something that started under the last government and something we think they got right.”
On the racial biases previously identified with LFR, Jones added that while systems have improved and are now “broadly accurate”, there still needs to be assurances that the technology is being used “in a correct way”.
Computer Weekly contacted the Home Office for more details about Jones’s remarks, including when the planned consultation will begin and whether the government also plans to consult on police use of retrospective facial recognition (RFR), but received no response by time of publication.
Computer Weekly also asked about the advice Jones said the government had already received, but again received no response by time of publication.
Jones’s remarks follow then-home secretary Yvette Cooper confirming for the first time in July 2025 that the government will create “a proper, clear governance framework” to regulate the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement.
Cooper specifically cited concerns among police themselves that the lack of regulation is holding back the technology’s further proliferation.
Long-standing concerns
While there have been repeated calls from both Parliament and civil society over many years for the police’s use of the technology to be regulated, the Home Office – prior to Cooper’s remarks – has consistently maintained that there is already a “comprehensive” framework in place.
Such calls for regulation include three separate inquiries by the Lords 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 LFR as far back as July 2019.
In August 2025, the UK’s equality watchdog declared the Met Police’s use of the technology – which is one of the few forces in the UK currently deploying it, alongside South Wales, Essex, Bedfordshire and others – unlawful.
John Kirkpatrick, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, specifically said the force is currently failing to meet key legal standards around necessity, proportionality and respect for human rights with its deployments.
“The law is clear: everyone has the right to privacy, to freedom of expression and to freedom of assembly,” he said. “These rights are vital for any democratic society. As such, there must be clear rules which guarantee that live facial recognition technology is used only where necessary, proportionate and constrained by appropriate safeguards. We believe that the Metropolitan Police’s current policy falls short of this standard.”
On top of a lack of clear regulation, the rapidly expanding roll-out of LFR by police forces has so far taken place with minimal consultation or public debate, with multiple instances of the technology being deployed despite public opposition.
For example, while the Met first used LFR at Notting Hill Carnival 2016, MPs only held their first debate on the topic in November 2024, eight years later.
In a further example, Computer Weekly revealed in December 2024 that, contrary to the Met’s claim its LFR deployments in Lewisham are supported by the majority of residents and local councillors, there was minimal direct consultation with residents, while councillors clearly continued to express concerns about it.
“What people support is safer streets, and improved equity and community cohesion,” Green Lewisham councillor Hau-Yu Tam told Computer Weekly at the time. “They don’t necessarily support live facial recognition, which they’re not given the full rundown of, or they’re given very misleading information about.”
In January 2023, Newham Council also unanimously passed a motion to suspend the use of LFR throughout the borough until biometric and anti-discrimination safeguards are in place.
While the motion highlighted the potential of LFR to “exacerbate racist outcomes in policing” – particularly in Newham, the most ethnically diverse of all local authorities in England and Wales – both the Met and the Home Office said that they would press forward with the deployments anyway.
In May 2025, the Ada Lovelace Institute published a report that noted the UK’s patchwork approach to regulating biometric surveillance technologies is “inadequate”, placing fundamental rights at risk and ultimately undermining public trust.
