Security and Policing: Facial Recognition Technology

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, first I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

I apologise to the noble Lord but he will have seen in the Companion, at paragraph 4.32,

“it is considered discourteous for members not to be present for at least the opening speeches”.

The noble Lord was not present for the opening speech, so I wonder whether he should reconsider his decision to take part in the debate.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, as I was about to say, it is frankly not good enough for government Whips to arrange for a notice to be sent out by email at 12.51 pm to say that a debate is about to start. If there has been any discourtesy it has been from the government Whips to myself. If the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, are content, I will say just two or three words—I do not see the noble Lord rising to his feet.

First, as I say, I apologise to the noble Baroness for not having heard her speech, but having known her for quite a number of years I can guess the tone and nature of her remarks. I start from the premise that, by and large, facial recognition techniques are extremely valuable to the police and security services and, as a consequence, extremely valuable to the general population. I read of a case only this week in which somebody had been extradited from one side of the world to the other because the facial recognition system at a point of entry had picked up that this person was on a database and wanted for multiple murders in another country. I think that taking such people out of circulation and giving them the opportunity to be tried properly is good. I suspect that the noble Baroness—although, as I say, for reasons beyond my control I did not hear her speech—argued that these very powerful techniques should be more closely regulated. My simple point is that these techniques are extremely powerful but they are out of the bag, the train has left the station, or whatever metaphor you want to use to express it.

The Chinese website Alibaba has introduced a system whereby you can smile to pay. That is China, which is different, of course, and I am not aware that any similar system is being adopted in the UK or in other western countries, but that technique is there and it is only a matter of time before non-state actors start to use these techniques far more widely than is currently the case. I just wonder whether we want to have a regulatory system that ties the hands of the police and security forces behind their back under such circumstances when those techniques are available. Of course there should be a regulatory framework, but if there is, it should apply universally. I leave it to the Government to work out how they would enforce such a regulatory framework in other sectors.

My final point is specifically for the Minister and will perhaps be more in tune with something that the noble Baroness may have said. I would be interested in the Minister telling us what arrangements are being made for the storage of the data collected by the police and security agencies. Has she put in place a system whereby those databases are held within the United Kingdom on servers that are solely within the United Kingdom and by contractors that do not have written into the small print of their contracts arrangements that would enable them to copy that material elsewhere? Before the noble Lord, Lord Young, stands up, I would be grateful for her answer.