The UK government has kicked off plans to ramp up police use of facial recognition, undeterred by a mounting civil liberties backlash and fresh warnings that any expansion risks turning public spaces into biometric dragnets.

A new Home Office consultation [PDF] published this week proposes creating a dedicated legal framework to govern live facial recognition and a widening class of “biometric and inferential technologies.” Ministers say the current patchwork of common law and data protection rules is too messy to support national deployment and argue police need clearer powers if they are to use the tools “at significantly greater scale.” 

The government describes facial recognition as “the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching,” and makes clear that the push goes beyond faces. The consultation opens the door to a unified legal regime for biometrics more broadly, aligning facial recognition with tools such as fingerprints and DNA-style evidence.

Ministers also point to Metropolitan Police statistics claiming 1,300 arrests over two years linked to facial recognition, including suspected rapists, domestic abusers, and violent offenders, as well as more than 100 registered sex offenders allegedly found breaching license conditions.

The Home Office highlights the three modes of facial recognition already in operational use: retrospective matching of crime scene or CCTV images against custody records; live facial recognition in public spaces; and operator-initiated checks via a mobile app to identify individuals without needing to arrest them.

Last year, the Home Office spent £12.6 million on facial recognition capabilities, including £2.8 million on national live facial recognition systems. This year it is allocating a further £6.6 million for rollout, evaluation, and development of a national facial-matching service.

The Home Office insists the goal is clarity, transparency, and public trust, but critics say the proposals lay the groundwork for a major expansion of state surveillance.

In a sharply worded response, Big Brother Watch blasted the plan as a significant escalation of state surveillance. It said: “Facial recognition surveillance is out of control, with the police’s own records showing over 7 million innocent people in England and Wales have been scanned by police facial recognition cameras in the past year alone.”

The group warned that “live facial recognition could be the end of privacy as we know it,” adding that the UK is “hurtling towards an authoritarian surveillance state that would make Orwell roll in his grave.”

Tony Kounnis, CEO of Face Int UK & Europe, a tech company specializing in the sector, told The Register that while he believes facial recognition can be highly effective in detecting threats, “important questions about privacy” remain. 

“If we are not very careful about how the technology works and how people’s data and identity is protected, then there will be a threat to people’s privacy as FRT becomes ever more common,” he said.

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Kounnis argued any expansion should be paired with “suitable policy and investment” to ensure adoption “does not infringe upon people’s privacy unnecessarily,” including clear rules on data storage and strict compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations.

The Home Office frames its proposal as an effort to bring order to a confusing legal landscape, which it says makes it hard for the public to understand their rights and difficult for police to make consistently lawful decisions. By contrast, a dedicated statute would spell out when watchlists can be built, who can authorize deployments, how long biometric data can be retained, and what independent oversight should look like.

Civil rights groups clearly expect that new laws will clear the runway for broader use of facial recognition technologies, fearing that once Parliament signs off on a statutory framework, police will step up deployments in shopping centers, stadiums, transport hubs, and high streets.

Big Brother Watch said: “For our streets to be safer the government need to focus their resources on real criminals rather than spending public money turning the country into an open prison with surveillance of the general population.”

What’s already clear is that the government’s ambitions for facial recognition are growing faster than public enthusiasm for being scanned on every street corner. ®