Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what is the AI model that will conduct AI facial age assessments on children at the border; and what assessment she has made of the risk of error and bias in AI facial age assessment technology to conduct age assessments on children seeking asylum.

The Home Office has recently announced that the procurement process for an FAE algorithm has concluded, and a new contract has been awarded to Akhter Computers Ltd, with Cognitec as sub-contractor. The awarded algorithm was trained on the supplier’s proprietary dataset consisting of millions of facial images collected over several decades, covering a broad range of ages, ethnicities, and genders.

Separately, the Home Office has used industry algorithms to test FAE performance against approximately 2.5 million operational images with a known age across different ethnicities, genders and age ranges, and showed, indicating promising performance and accuracy. Internal testing and trialling is ongoing using the newly procured algorithm. Demographic differentials and the public sector equality duty have been a crucial part of this testing and ongoing policy development.

Our published factsheet - Facial age estimation - GOV.UK- explains how the technology works, and how the Department is exploring its use.