Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the statutory basis for the use of facial recognition technology by the police is.

The Government believes that there is a legal framework for the use of live facial recognition technology, although that is being challenged in the courts and we would not want to pre-empt the outcome of this case.

The police have common law powers to use the technology for the purposes of preventing or detecting crime. Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018 is the statutory basis for the processing of the facial images obtained from the technology for these purposes. Possible matches produced by these sys-tems are always checked by a human operator before deciding what, if any, action to take.