Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Pannick and Lord Strasburger

Report stage
Monday 9th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

This is another context where there has to be a fair balance between competing interests. One can easily see that the use of live facial recognition is a vital policing tool. However, as has been explained, it has an adverse impact on privacy. What concerns me is that the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act require not merely that steps taken are necessary and proportionate, which the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, rightly referred to, but it is a requirement that any restrictions or provisions in such a context must be prescribed by law.

I am very concerned that having police authorities and police officers exercising a pure discretion, without any statutory guidance or code of practice, may well fail that legal test of prescribed by law, because of the uncertainty and the excess of discretion. Therefore, the Government would be well advised in this sensitive context to ensure that there is statutory guidance and a statutory code of practice. The Minister may be unable to accept this amendment, but I hope he will be able to tell the House that steps will be taken to provide clear guidance to police authorities as to the use of this technology.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

There is no question, as I understand Clause 154, of a blank cheque, and there is no question here of underhand methods. What the clause requires is that the Secretary of State produces regulations, and the regulations must specify the circumstances in which information may be made available under this section. I am assuming that in due course, the Government are going to bring forward regulations to implement this provision. Those regulations will have to be laid before Parliament, and there will be an opportunity, if any noble Lord wishes to do so, to debate those regulations. I suggest that that is the time to assess whether the regulations contain a fair balance between the rights of the individual and the public interest.

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, the DVLA driver database must not be turned into a ready-made line-up for facial recognition systems. This is about more than data protection; it is about the basic relationship between citizen and state. People did not hand over their photographs to the DVLA so that the Government could quietly repurpose them for mass identification; they did so under legal compulsion to get a driving licence.

Using those images to power facial recognition searches fundamentally changes the deal after the fact. It turns a compulsory single-purpose database into an all-purpose surveillance tool, without anyone ever having given meaningful consent. Once you allow the police to run facial recognition matches against the DVLA database, you create the possibility of identifying almost anyone, almost anywhere, from a single image. That goes far beyond investigating named suspects. It enables trawling through the entire driving population to find possible matches, with all the risk of false positives that facial recognition systems already carry. A bad match here is not an abstract error. It is a real person, wrongly flagged, questioned or even arrested, because a machine thought their face looked similar.

The DVLA database is also nearly universal for adults. That makes it uniquely tempting. If we normalise using it for facial recognition in one context, it will not stop there. Today, it might be justified for serious crime. Tomorrow, it could creep into protests, public events or routine inquiries. Once the precedent is set that every licence holder’s image is fair game for search, the barrier to expanding that use becomes paper-thin.

There is also a democratic principle at stake here. When the state wants new investigative powers that are this sweeping, it should come to Parliament and ask for them openly, with clear limits, safeguards and independent oversight. What must not happen is a quiet, technical integration between the facial recognition system and the DVLA database, introduced by secondary legislation and governed mainly by internal policies and obscure memoranda of understanding. This is legislation by the backdoor, not by debate.

If we allow the DVLA database to be searched with facial recognition, we are not just making investigations a little more efficient; we are rebuilding the basic infrastructure of our democracy so that the state can, in principle, put a name to almost any face. We are doing that using images people had no real choice about providing, and for a completely different purpose. So, the line we should draw is simple and firm: the DVLA driver database is for licensing drivers, not for powering facial recognition line-ups. If any Government want to change that, they must come back to Parliament with primary legislation, make their case in public and accept strict statutory constraints. Until then, we should say clearly that turning a compulsory licensing database into a de facto national ID gallery is a step too far for a free society. That is what Amendment 380 does and I commend it to the House.

Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Pannick and Lord Strasburger

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I draw the Committee’s attention to my interest as chair of Big Brother Watch. I will speak about Amendments 369 and 371 in the name of my colleague and noble friend Lord Marks.

Protest is the lifeblood of any vibrant democracy, and in the United Kingdom it is one of the most powerful ways for ordinary citizens to make their voices heard. Our democratic system depends not only on elections but on the active participation of the people between elections. Protest is essential because it allows us to challenge decisions, hold leaders accountable and demand change when systems seem slow or unresponsive.

Throughout our history, protest has driven meaningful progress. Universal male suffrage in Britain was pushed forward by mass movements such as the Chartists and later reform campaigns which used strikes, mass meetings and demonstrations to pressure Parliament into extending the franchise and paying MPs so that working-class men could serve. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that I imagine those were quite inconvenient to a few people. Women’s suffrage in the UK was won by the suffragettes only after decades of marches, processions, civil disobedience and hunger strikes, culminating in the Representation of the People Act.

Peaceful protest educates the public, sparks debate and creates the pressure necessary for reform. In a healthy democracy, disagreement is not a threat but a sign that citizens care deeply about their society. However, our right to protest is, as has already been said, under relentless attack. Through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, the previous Government introduced multiple restrictions on our precious right to protest. Then last year, the current Government found a way to further suppress peaceful demonstrations by misusing terrorism legislation to stop protests. This led to 2,700 arrests of mostly elderly people who were protesting about what was happening in Gaza. We had the bizarre sight, week after week, of police arresting vicars and old ladies in Parliament Square when they posed no threat whatever to anyone.

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

Can I just point out to the noble Lord, if he will allow me to, that these people were not arrested for expressing a view about Gaza? They were arrested for supporting Palestine Action, which is a violent terrorist group.