Security and Policing: Facial Recognition Technology

Baroness Williams of Trafford Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for that and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for bringing forward this debate on a very important issue, now and in the future. I start by stressing the importance the Government place on giving law enforcement the tools it needs to prevent terrorism and cut crime. However, it is also important to build public trust in our use of biometrics, including the use of facial images and facial recognition technology.

Biometric data is of critical importance in law enforcement, and various forms and uses of biometric data have an increasingly significant role in everyday life in the UK. However, the technology is of course changing rapidly. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, talked about gait analysis technology, voice technology and other types of technology that are rapidly emerging. We are committed to producing a framework that ensures that organisations can innovate in their use and deployment of biometric technologies, such as facial recognition, and do so, crucially, in a transparent and ethical way. Noble Lords have talked about ethics in this as well. Maintaining public trust and confidence is absolutely key; achieving this involves a more open approach to the development and deployment of new technologies. We remain committed to ensuring that our use of biometrics, including those provided to law enforcement partners, is legal, ethical, transparent and robust.

In answer to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, we will publish the Home Office biometrics strategy in June this year, as I outlined to the Science and Technology Committee. The strategy will address the use of facial recognition technology. There is ongoing work to implement last year’s custody images review, which provides a right to request deletion, and we are planning improvements to the governance of police use of custody images and facial recognition technology.

Automatic facial recognition, or AFR, is a rapidly evolving technology with huge potential, as the noble Lord, Lord Evans, and others powerfully illustrated. There have been some suggestions that there is no guidance on police use of AFR. The Home Office has published the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice, which sets out the guiding principles for striking a balance between protecting the public and upholding civil liberties. The noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Evans, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans all pointed this out, as did others. Police forces are obliged under the Protection of Freedoms Act—POFA—to have regard to this code. Similarly, the Information Commissioner’s Office has issued a code of practice, which explains how data protection legislation applies to the use of surveillance cameras and promotes best practice. However, to address the point of the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, we believe that more can be done to improve governance around AFR and we are discussing options for doing this with the commissioners and the police. I am very pleased to see the really good practice already being followed in this area, such as the work being done by South Wales Police, which I will go into in a bit more detail in a few minutes. We are working to ensure that this is consistently applied across all areas by tightening up our oversight arrangements of AFR.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and others talked about the retention of custody images and whether that was illegal, following the 2012 High Court ruling. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, also alluded to this. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 gives police the power to take facial photographs of anyone detained following arrest. The regime governing the retention of custody images is set out in the Code of Practice on the Management of Police Information and statutory guidance contained in the College of Policing’s authorised professional practice. The Police Act 1996 requires chief officers to have regard to such codes of practice. In addition, the Information Commissioner and Surveillance Camera Commissioner promote their respective codes of practice.

Following the custody images review, people who are not subsequently convicted of an offence may request that their custody image be deleted from all police databases, with a presumption that it will be unless there is an exceptional policing reason for it to be retained, such as if an individual has known links to organised crime or terrorism. Assuming that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has links to neither—

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

Not yet.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

Not yet—you heard it first at the Dispatch Box. I suggested some months ago that the noble Baroness should request that her image be removed. I am assuming that she has now done so and that, therefore, it is in the process of being removed. But the police should automatically review all the custody images of convicted people that they hold, in line with scheduled review periods set out in the College of Policing’s Authorised Professional Practice to ensure that they retain only those that they need to keep.

On the point about illegality suggested by a couple of noble Lords, the court did not rule that there was an issue with applying facial recognition software to legitimately retained images. Following the CIR, we are clear that unconvicted people have the right to apply for the deletion of their image, with a presumption in favour of deletion. However, the police, as I said, have the right to retain an image in the cases that I outlined.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, talked about oversight. This is a very good question which was brought out by the Science and Technology Committee. Noble Lords also talked about the Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group. In line with the recommendations of the triennial review of the Home Office science bodies, the Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group’s remit has been extended to cover the ethical issues associated with all forensic identification techniques, including, but not limited to, facial recognition technology and fingerprinting. The Government are exploring the expansion of oversight of facial recognition systems. They are also seeking to establish an oversight board to enable greater co-ordination and transparency on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement. Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that we are consulting with stakeholders such as the NPCC, the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, the Information Commissioner and the Biometrics Commissioner.

Noble Lords mentioned two specific instances: Notting Hill and the South Wales Police. I think that I have time to talk about both events. In 2016-17, when facial recognition technology was piloted at the Notting Hill Carnival, the Metropolitan Police published this on its website. This is in line with the fact that it is a pilot and that it is important that police let people know about it. The public were informed that the technology involved the use of overt—not covert—cameras, which scan the faces of those passing by and flag up potential matches against a specific database of custody images, and that the database had been populated with about 500 images of individuals who were forbidden to attend the carnival, as well as individuals wanted by police who it was believed might attend the carnival to commit offences. I must stress that this system does not involve a search against all images held on the police national database or the Met systems. The public were also advised that if a match was made by the system, officers would be alerted and would seek to speak to the individuals to verify their identity, making arrests if necessary. I think that it was the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, who talked about mismatches with BME people, even between men and women. That goes back to the point that this is evolving technology and in no way would it be used at this point in time other than in a pilot situation.

South Wales Police took a very proactive approach to communications in its pilot. In addition to the more formal press briefing notices, it used social media in the form of YouTube and Facebook to explain the technology to the public and publicise its deployment—and, most importantly, it published the results. In its publicity, South Wales Police has been very aware of concerns about privacy and has stressed that it has built checks and balances into its methodology to make sure that the approach is justified and balanced. It consulted the Biometrics Commissioner, the Information Commissioner and the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, all of whom are represented on the South Wales Police automatic facial recognition strategic partnership board, and gave them the opportunity to comment on the privacy impact assessment that was carried out in relation to the pilot. This resulted in a very positive press response to the pilot. The force also published a public round-up of six months of the pilot on its Facebook page.

I will go on now to the PIA, which links to that point. The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, asked about the Government doing a privacy impact assessment. I can confirm that the Home Office biometrics programme carried out privacy impact assessments on all of its strategic projects to ensure that they maximised the benefits to the public while protecting the privacy of individuals and also addressed any potential impact of data aggregation.

The noble Lords, Lord Harris and Lord Kennedy, asked about arrangements for the storage of images. The Police National Database is based in the UK. Images are taken from custody systems run by each police force and then loaded on to the PND.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, asked whether passport and driving licence photos were available to police. They are not used by the police when deploying facial recognition technology. They may be used under specific conditions for other policing purposes.

I thank noble Lords once again for their participation in this debate and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones.