Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that the use of facial recognition and AI technologies by the police is transparent.

Facial recognition is an important tool that assists the police in protecting the public, and identifying the perpetrators of crime, and we want to ensure that we maximise the potential of that technology to support our Safer Streets mission.

At the same time, we recognise the importance of ensuring that facial recognition technology operates on a firm footing, and I have been meeting with the police, regulators, civil society groups, industry and others to discuss this matter carefully.

We will continue to have those discussions, and I will be meeting with MPs and Peers in the coming weeks.