According to the human rights group Liberty, the UK government’s proposed Crime and Policing Bill would transform the country’s driving licence database into de facto facial recognition database. This would allow police to access biometric information on millions of people who never committed a criminal offense.

Presented to Parliament on February 25, 2025.

The Home Office-sponsored bill (19459056) will introduce a number of measures that will extend police powers in UK, including a ban on wearing face covers or using pyrotechnics at protests and the introduction “respect orders” for so-called “antisocial behaviour”.

Although the bill does not explicitly mention facial recognition technology, the measures are still applicable.

The proposed legislation is very similar to the Criminal Justice Bill of the previous Conservative government, which was drafted by Chris Philp, then the police minister. Philp stated that the bill would allow law enforcement agencies, including the NCA, to search driving licence records for facial recognition.

This would be a big step in extending the use of facial-recognition technology from police databases to all drivers with a licence. “Every photo in the DVLA database can be accessed by police, forming a digital police lineup.” If this is what the government wants, it should be transparent, and not sneak through rights-restricting laws.

Privacy group Big Brother Watch, in a written submission to the Parliament regarding the previous government’s efforts to link the DVLA databases to facial recognition systems said that it represented “a huge and disproportionate expansion of the police surveillance powers which would place the majority Brits in a digital line-up without their consent”.

The group added that establishing a precedent in which police can access a nonpolice database and sift millions of people’s data “would cause grave concern” for privacy. In a country that respects human rights, the public will not expect police to have access to their facial biometrics in the DVLA database any less than they expect them to have access to their DNA biometrics in NHS databases.

Liberty, commenting on the proposed Crime and Policing Bill added that police should not be allowed to access a database containing biometric records for people who aren’t on a wanted-list, haven’t committed a crime and didn’t consent to their information being used in this manner.

Liberty added that the proposed code should not be accepted by police as a safety measure. “There should be primary laws governing the use of facial recognition by police in general. It should not be done in this manner.

The UK does not have a law that covers the use of facial recognition technology by the police. However, successive governments have stated it is covered by a “comprehensive framework” which is a patchwork of legislation. While there have been written questions and responses from Parliament on facial recognition over the years, the only formal debate in Parliament about how police use the technology was held in November of 2024. This was the first time that MPs have openly discussed the police’s use of the technology in the eight years following the first deployment of live facial recognition by the Metropolitan Police in August 2016 at the Notting Hill Carnival.

Since the initial deployment, Parliament and civil society have repeatedly called for new legal frameworks that govern law enforcement’s usage of LFR technology. Three separate inquiries by the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee have been conducted into shoplifting and police algorithms, as well as police facial recognition. Two former UK biometrics commissioners – Paul Wiles and Fraser Sampson – have also been involved, as has an independent legal review by Matthew Ryder QC, the UK Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. Since a few years, attempts have been made to link facial recognition systems created for other purposes with UK databases.

Philp announced his intention in October 2023 to give police access to the UK passport database. He claimed that this would improve their facial recognition abilities to catch shoplifters.

While Philp’s proposals were criticized by privacy and human rights groups, UK regulators took issue as well. Fraser Sampson was the former biometrics and surveillance commission of England and Wales.

BBC It is important that police do not give the impression that they are on a “digital lineup”.

He said that the state had a large collection of high-quality photos of a significant portion of the population, including drivers and passport holders, which were originally required as a condition for, say, international travel and driving.

If the state routinely compares every photograph with every picture of a suspected crime, just because it can do so, there is a risk of disproportionality as well as damaging public trust,” said Sampson.

The Scottish biometrics commissioner Brian Plastow said that it would also be “egregious”, to link the UK passport database with facial-recognition systems, arguing that it would potentially be unlawful and “unethical”.

He said that the suggestion that images provided by law-abiding citizens for a specific purpose to UK government agencies to obtain a UK driving license or passport could then be routinely accessed and ‘bulk-washed’ by the police against images of low-level crime scenes was neither proportionate nor strictly needed and would damage public trust.