Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when the Idemia facial recognition algorithm for Home Office strategic facial matching will be rolled out across police forces.

The Home Secretary has commissioned His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary (HMICFRS) to conduct an inspection of police and relevant law enforcement agencies’ use of retrospective facial recognition. The detail of the inspection and publication of the report are a matter for HMICFRS, but they will look at whether there have been or are likely to have been any wrongful arrests as a result of the use of retrospective facial recognition.

Additionally, the Home Office is aware of the risk of bias in facial recognition algorithms and supports policing in managing that risk. Manual safeguards, embedded in police training, operational practice, and guidance, require all potential matches returned from the Police National Database (PND) to be visually assessed by a trained user and investigating officer. If the trained PND user or investigator decides a facial search image provides a potential match, this must be treated as intelligence rather than evidence and additional lines of enquiry must be undertaken before any action is taken. These safeguards have always been in place, even before the independent National Physical Laboratory (NPL) testing.

The Home Office does not issue guidance on setting algorithm thresholds. The National Police Chiefs’ Council and police forces consider the impact and equitability of facial recognition technology in line with their Public Sector Equality Duty. The threshold is set for all forces by a Chief Constable on behalf of the NPCC to balance the equitability of facial searching, and the operational imperative to find true matches where they are present on PND.

The Home Office takes the findings of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) report very seriously and has already acted. The Police Reform White Paper included a commitment to invest £26m into the development and delivery of a national facial recognition system for policing using a new algorithm. The new facial recognition algorithm has been independently tested by the NPL and this showed that it can be used at settings with no statistically significant bias. The new service will be operationally tested by the police in the coming months and will be subject to evaluation to inform future decisions about rolling out the new system with the new algorithm.