Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many faces have been uploaded onto the police facial recognition database since the ruling against the Metropolitan Police Service in 2012; which police forces made those uploads; and how many faces each force has uploaded.

There is no facial recognition database as such. The Police National Database (PND) includes photographs of persons taken on their arrest. These images can be uploaded onto the PND by police forces.

Full face images of a suitable size and quality are then enrolled in the facial image recognition gallery within PND, which can be searched using automated facial recognition software. Information on the number of facial images loaded by forces since June 2012 is not readily available