Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Doocey]

374: Clause 141, page 182, line 42, at end insert—
“(4) After section 14, insert—“14ZZA Imposition of conditions: live facial recognitionPrior to imposing conditions under either section 12 (imposing conditions on public processions) or 14 (imposing conditions on public assemblies), the senior officer of the police force in question must confirm that live facial recognition will not be in use, unless a new statutory code of practice for the use of live facial recognition surveillance in public spaces in England and Wales has previously been presented to, and approved by, both Houses of Parliament.””Member's explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that police cannot use live facial recognition technology when imposing conditions on public assemblies or processions under sections 12 or 14, unless a new, specific code of practice governing its use in public spaces has first been formally approved by both Houses of Parliament. It is intended to safeguard public privacy and civil liberties by requiring democratic oversight before this surveillance technology is deployed in such contexts.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 374 seeks to place statutory guardrails on the use of live facial recognition, echoing the recent calls from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. We recognise that this technology can assist the police in tackling serious crime, but it must be used responsibly. Its rapid spread into everyday policing before essential safeguards or parliamentary scrutiny are in place raises profound constitutional concerns, particularly in the policing of dissent. Amendment 374 addresses the most contentious use of this technology, at protests and public assemblies. It would prohibit live facial recognition when police impose conditions under the Public Order Act unless and until Parliament had approved a new statutory code of practice. These are moments when people exercise their fundamental rights to free expression and peaceful assembly; rights which depend on participants feeling safe from tracking or retrospective profiling.

This Bill already tightens protest offences and curbs anonymity; layering unregulated facial scanning on top of those restrictions risks further shrinking the space for lawful dissent. Many people will have perfectly legitimate reasons to think twice before attending a demonstration if they know their face may be scanned. Without clarity on how watch-lists used at protests are compiled, people have no way of knowing whether they are being flagged for genuine risk or for the views they hold. At a protest, the chilling effect is not just about being scanned; it is the fear of political profiling. If the Government cannot clearly define who is a legitimate target for facial recognition at a peaceful assembly, then such deployments are, by definition, arbitrary and cannot meet the legal test of necessity and proportionality.

Operationally, the emerging concerns around false positives and the significantly increased risk to those from minority-ethnic backgrounds are a real headache for policing large public gatherings. Deployment without a code of practice will likely result in dozens of wrongful stops to verify identities, with confrontations that divert officers from real security threats and de-escalating crowds. We have already seen how damaging these errors can be. Just in the last few weeks, an innocent south Asian man was arrested at his home in Southampton for a burglary 100 miles away in Milton Keynes. He was handcuffed and held for nearly 10 hours because he was wrongly matched to CCTV footage by a Home Office algorithm that its own research shows produces significantly higher false positives for black and Asian faces. Last month, a man was publicly ejected from his local supermarket after staff misinterpreted a facial recognition alert.

These are not minor glitches to be shrugged off. They are serious violations that erode public trust, particularly in communities already wary of state power. The Government’s consultation is welcome, but it is far too slow for the pace of change we see on our streets. Until Parliament has set clear rules, Amendment 374 is both necessary and proportionate. We must ensure that Parliament, not oblique algorithms, decides the limit of state power. I beg to move.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, we are talking today about live facial recognition at protests and why the police must not be allowed to use it until Parliament has agreed a clear and democratic code of practice. At its heart, Amendment 374 is about power and trust. Live facial recognition is not just another camera on a street corner; it is a mass surveillance tool that can scan every face in a crowd, compare people in real time against a watch-list and permanently change what it feels like to stand in the public square. Once you normalise all that at protests, you change the character of protest itself.

If people think that simply turning up at a demonstration means that their face can be scanned, logged and potentially mismatched to a suspect list, some will decide that it is safer to stay at home. That is a direct, chilling effect on the right to protest, to assemble and to speak out against, or for, the Government. We should not let that happen by stealth through a patchwork of local decisions and internal guidance that most citizens will never see. That is what is happening at the moment.

The technology itself is far from neutral. We know that facial recognition systems can and do get things wrong. They perform differently across age groups and ethnicities. A false match in the context of a protest is not a minor inconvenience. It can mean being stopped, questioned, detained or stigmatised in front of your friends, your colleagues or your community, not because of something you did but because an algorithm made a guess. Allowing that at political protests without proper rules and oversight is an invitation to injustice.

It is not enough to say, “Trust the police. We have internal policies”. The question here is not whether any particular chief constable is well-intentioned; it is whether the state should be able to scan and track people at political gatherings without Parliament having debated, defined and limited that power. In a democracy, if the Government want tools that can alter the balance of power between citizen and state, they must come to Parliament, set out the case and accept constraints.

That is why a publicly debated statutory code of practice matters. It is where we answer basic questions that are currently left in the grey zone. In what circumstances, if any, is live facial recognition at a protest justified? Who sets the watch-lists and on what criteria? What happens to images of people who are not of interest? Are they actually deleted? If so, how quickly? Who can access them and for what purposes? What independent oversight exists when things go wrong? Until those questions are answered openly, the use of live facial recognition at protests rests on unpublished risk assessments and technical documents that ordinary citizens cannot challenge and that elected representatives cannot easily amend. That is the opposite of how intrusive powers should be operated in a liberal democracy.

We should also be honest about the precedent. If we accept live facial recognition at protests now, without a code, it will be used more often and for more purposes later. Once the infrastructure is there and the practice is normalised, it will be very hard to row back. The time to set limits is before the rollout, not after the abuses. Police should not have, without parliamentary approval, the ability to quietly turn every protest into a data-harvesting exercise, watching not just the few who pose a risk but the many who are simply exercising their rights.

The principle is simple: if live facial recognition is to be used at all in the context of political protest, it must be under a clear and democratically approved code of practice, debated in Parliament, tested against our human rights obligations and subject to real oversight and redress. Until that is in place, the police should not be allowed to deploy this technology at protests.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

As I have tried to indicate to the noble Lord, we have had a consultation that finished on 12 February, and we intend to respond to it by the summer. Currently, what that response will be is to be formulated, so I will not give him chapter and verse on when and how. However, if legislation is required, we will look at that at the earliest opportunity, as we always do.

I cannot pre-empt the King’s Speech and I cannot give a timetable on that, but I will give a timetable when we respond to the consultation. We should remember that the Government initiated the consultation—we were not forced into it—to get to a position whereby the very issues that noble Lords have mentioned today are considered. With those comments, I hope the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and all noble Lords who have spoken. I have no doubt at all that everything the Minister said, he actually believes. But it reminds me of when I was on the Metropolitan Police Authority for the first time and I went round all the police stations in London—I think there were 32 at the time, with 32 borough commanders. The first thing I noticed was that, at the time, if you took samples, they had to be stored in a fridge for X number of days at a particular temperature and then they had to be destroyed within another number of days. In almost 60% of the stations I visited, none of this had happened.

So I understand what the Minister is saying: that unnecessary facial recognition photographs will be destroyed instantly. But I would feel much happier if there was some process for ensuring that that is being done and a way of checking that. I am pleased to hear that there is going to be a debate on what guardrails are needed—because they are desperately needed—but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 374 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Doocey]

380: Clause 154, page 201, line 24, at end insert—
“(7A) Authorised persons listed in section 71A may not use the information referenced in subsection (1) for the purposes of biometric searches using facial recognition technology.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that the DVLA database cannot be used for searches using live facial recognition.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 380 erects a vital safeguard. It blocks Clause 154 from handing millions of drivers’ private photos to the police for facial recognition searches without full parliamentary scrutiny and explicit consent. It stops a road traffic database being quietly repurposed for mass biometric surveillance, while still allowing proportionate, tightly regulated data sharing for genuine policing needs.

In Committee, Peers from across the House voiced concerns echoing not just the Liberal Democrats but a wide range of civil society groups, among them Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Justice, StopWatch, Inquest and Privacy International. The Minister still tells us that this is merely a tidying-up exercise with no impact on facial recognition, but the evidence tells a very different story. It points to a plan to funnel photos of over 50 million innocent drivers into a vast facial recognition repository, dismantling vital privacy safeguards.

For anyone who thinks that sounds exaggerated, let me make three points. First, the previous Government explicitly justified an almost identical clause on the basis that it would enable facial recognition searches; they were candid about that intention. If this Government do not share that purpose, they should have no difficulty supporting my amendment.

Secondly, thanks to freedom of information requests, we now know that other civic databases, passports and immigration records are already acting as de facto facial recognition libraries, without public knowledge, consent or a clear parliamentary mandate.

Thirdly, there is a strategic facial match-up project—a joint Home Office and police scheme—to enable facial recognition searches across multiple databases, including non-policing ones. Its existence has yet to be confirmed in public Home Office policy documents, having surfaced only via government tender notices, media reports and oblique spending references. If this project does not exist, I invite the Minister to set the record straight.

Facial recognition turns an ordinary photograph into biometric data, a unique identifier like a fingerprint or DNA, which in law should be retained for criminal justice purposes only under very strict safeguards. The UK does not currently have population-wide biometric databases of innocent citizens. Creating a single, easily accessible policing platform for these civil images runs directly against the European Court of Human Rights’ warning that blanket retention of biometrics is a serious and disproportionate interference with privacy. Plugging the DVLA database into a facial recognition engine also risks creating a honeypot for hostile states and criminals, exposing the lifelong biometric signatures of almost every adult driver.

There are practical problems as well. Driving licence photos are updated only every 10 years, so the database already holds millions of outdated images. Using that kind of so-called “noisy data” for facial recognition inevitably increases the risk of false positives and wrongful stops. We know that this technology is far less precise than DNA and has already contributed to wrongful accusations, yet we are assured that its accuracy is improving. However, there is no timescale for this. The Government are, in effect, asking Parliament to sign a blank cheque for mass access to our biometric data. Amendment 380 simply asks this House not to hand them the pen. I beg to move.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I know a young man who has just got his driving licence. He is very excited and sees it as a rite of passage; he is now a grown-up. He has joined the club of drivers and he shows his driving licence with pride. I can assure noble Lords he has no idea that applying for a driving licence means that he is joining a vast biometric police database, a club of police surveillance, and his mugshot will be treated like one of those Most Wanted gallery of rogues images.

This is a corruption of public trust. The public apply for one thing, only for it to be subverted and used for something else. It seems to me to be duplicitous and behind the backs of the public. Currently, police forces can directly access and search DVLA data only in relation to road traffic offences and must phone the DVLA in relation to other offences. I note that the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, would not prevent police forces accessing DVLA data for law enforcement purposes, but it should not be the default position. It is important to create this safeguard to prevent such data being used to conduct, in effect, phishing exercises of facial recognition. Therefore, we need this amendment to be taken seriously and I will be interested in what the Minister has to say.

This is not some paranoid dystopian vision. In a recent submission to the Home Affairs Committee, the National Police Chiefs’ Council stated that police chiefs were indeed seeking access to the DVLA database for facial recognition. That would be a huge expansion of police surveillance powers, granting them access, as we have heard, to the biometric data of tens of millions of citizens. We cannot overestimate how important it is that we do not just nod this through but take seriously the risk to civil liberties. It is why the noble Baroness’s Amendment 380, which creates a safeguard, is so important: to protect the civil liberties and privacy of innocent driving licence holders.

I conclude with a quote from Big Brother Watch, which says that this represents

“a disproportionate expansion of police powers to track and identify citizens across time and locations for low-level policing needs”.

In a way, it is an abuse of the police to ask them to use these underhand methods, and it is therefore vital that there are safeguards in law to prevent this happening, particularly because it is happening behind the backs of ordinary people.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a useful debate. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, for tabling the amendment, and to the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for speaking in support of it. I am grateful for the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, which echo some of the points that I will make. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, pointed to one of the arguments that I will make: that access to the data will be subject to a statutory code of practice to ensure that its use is appropriate.

I remind noble Lords of the purpose of Clause 154: it is simply about bringing legislation up to date, which is what I said in Committee when we debated this matter. As a result of technical changes to the way police and law enforcement access driving licence data, it has become clear that we need to improve the DVLA data access regime by setting out clearly in statute—which is what Clause 154 does—which persons can access DVLA driving licence data. The legislation provides additional clarity on this issue.

The measure will enable us, through secondary legislation made under these new powers—this goes to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—to expand the purposes for which DVLA data may be accessed automatically to include policing or law enforcement purposes. This means that the police will have another tool to cut crime and keep the public safe, in line with the commitment by chief officers to pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry when investigating an offence. I emphasise that access to the data will be subject to a statutory code of practice to ensure that its use is appropriate.

We are clear that there will be strong safeguards around the use of DVLA data, which, as I have said, will be introduced via regulations made under the new provisions. We debated earlier government Amendment 382, which ensures that these regulations are subject to the affirmative procedure in both Houses, in line with a recommendation from the Constitution Committee.

We want to ensure that officers undergo training prior to being able to access information. The police are already legally required to consult with local communities. Extensive audits of who has accessed DVLA driving licence data are maintained. It is already standard practice that each time the DVLA driver database is accessed by a police officer, the details of what information is accessed and for what purpose is logged. This will continue to be the case once the revised measure is implemented.

On the issue of facial recognition technology, I want to make it clear to all noble Lords who have signed this amendment, including the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, that police forces do not conduct biometric facial recognition searches against images contained on the DVLA database. Officers use the DVLA database for day-to-day policing matters. Anybody who has watched a police programme on a Monday night—when they get the opportunity in the recess to do so—will have at some point seen a police officer pull over a car and look at an individual who says, “I haven’t got my licence with me”, and tell them they are Jimmy Jones of X address. The police officer then wants to check that they are Jimmy Jones of X address, and so they access the DVLA database. Nine times out of 10, on the police shows that I watch on a Monday night during recess, it is a false name, and therefore there is police action accordingly. That is the purpose for which the police currently use the database.

As I said in our earlier debate on Amendment 374, the use of facial recognition technology in all circumstances is currently subject to safeguards, such as the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act. As I have said in previous discussions, any use of facial recognition technology will be subject to the outcome of the consultation that we finished on 10 February. That will be completed in about 12 weeks and, by the summer, we will have government proposals which the noble Baroness, along with both Houses of Parliament, can scrutinise, to achieve some view on whatever the Government propose following the outcome of that consultation.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, that, if the amendment were agreed by the Government tonight then the police officer who stopped somebody on the street—potentially a drunk driver, an unlicensed driver or a driver with no insurance—would not be able to access the DVLA database. That goes to the very points that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, made in his speech.

This is not about mass surveillance. It is about using the DVLA database in an appropriate way—logged, recorded and monitored by the police to ensure that we check that person A is actually the right person who can drive that vehicle at that particular time. It is not, with due respect to noble Lords, mass surveillance. It is proper use of police technology to ensure that the DVLA database helps catch bad actors in the act of doing bad things. I hope the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, there is no chance at all that I am going to withdraw the amendment, but I think the Minister knows that. We are not on the same page on this. How on earth can the Government justify taking information that people have given for one purpose and using it for something else? It is totally and utterly disgraceful. People have given their photographs to get a driving licence; it is wrong that they can now be repurposed to be checked by police. Just let me finish the sentence. There is nothing wrong with the Government, in their consultation, saying to people, “We want to repurpose the DVLA driving licence database because it would be really helpful to police. Would you be willing to agree to this?”, but they did not say that. They have just taken it.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Does the noble Baroness think that a police officer, at 11 pm, on a street here in Westminster, should not access the DVLA database to check that the person is who they say they are? If she thinks that, she would really be blowing a hole in every Monday night television programme that I have ever watched.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

I suggest that the Minister has been watching too many of these television programmes. There is a complete lack of transparency. The Information Commissioner’s Office had to learn about the use of passport databases through media reports, rather than Home Office disclosure, even though this appears to have been happening since 2019. It is just so completely and utterly wrong. If people had given their information for it be used for those purposes, it would be fair enough and no problem at all, but they did not and the Government have taken it without permission. The whole situation is absolutely appalling.

There is the potential for 50 million drivers to be put on a permanent database and to be checked every single day. Of course, the police want it; I would want it if I were the police. It will make their lives so much easier. It will make it very easy for them to check everything they need to check, but that should not be the purpose of this.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

The noble Baroness is very eloquently making her case on the basis of a lack of consent. I suggest to her that the police regularly use material that people have not given their consent for them to use—for example, their fingerprints and saliva.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

I do not accept that that is the same as 50 million innocent drivers being put on a database. However, I have given all the arguments and we have had this debate twice. The noble Lord is gesturing. I am sorry; what does that mean?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I was simply saying that, as the noble Baroness has already indicated that she is going to divide the House and given the hour, it would probably be quite useful just to go to that stage.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

I think that is very unfair, because my speeches are probably shorter than those of anybody in this House. The noble Lord should not pick on me because he does not like what I am saying. I do not like being bullied.

I do not believe that what the Government are doing is right and I would like to test the opinion of the House.