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.”

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.