The government has opened a consultation on a legal framework for the use of facial recognition technologies amid controversy over a 'surveillance society'. 

Sarah Jones, minister for policing and crime prevention, said the technology is ‘a valuable tool to modern policing’, which had led to 962 arrests in the year to September 2025 for offences including rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, grievous bodily harm and robbery. It had also led to 127 arrests following last year’s summer riots, she added.

‘But I understand there are legitimate concerns about this powerful technology’, the MP for Croydon West added. ‘There are questions we must address about the state’s powers to process its citizens’ biometric data, and about public confidence in the police to act proportionately. And we know some people have significant doubts about this.

‘Whilst it is clear there is a legal framework within which facial recognition can be used now, I believe that confident, safe, and consistent use of facial recognition and similar technologies at significantly greater scale requires a more specific legal framework. This will ensure law enforcement can properly harness the power of this technology whilst maintaining public confidence over the long term.

‘In the more specific legal framework, we must ensure we balance the seriousness of harm the police are seeking to detect or prevent with individual rights, as well as how the use of technology is independently monitored. We must also ensure the framework is resilient to future technological developments.’

The consultation ends on 12 February next year and representations are welcome from professional bodies, interested groups and the wider public.

An academic study published this week found that real-world trials of live facial recognition by UK and European police lack rigorous oversight and could lead to the 'incremental and insidious removal' of the conditions that underpin basic freedoms.

Police testing of facial recognition systems in real-world settings was described as a ‘Wild West’ in urgent need of reform to put essential safeguards in place, in the study led by researchers from the University of Birmingham and Guanghua Law School published in the journal Data & Policy. 

Co-author Karen Yeung, an interdisciplinary professorial fellow in law, ethics and informatics at Birmingham Law School at the University of Birmingham, said: ‘Our comparative study found that previous trials have failed to take into account the socio-technical impacts of the systems in use, or to generate clear evidence of the operational benefits.’