Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she has made of the (a) accuracy of live facial recognition technology, (b) potential for biased outputs and decision-making from facial recognition technology system operators and (c) the adequacy of criteria for deployment of facial recognition technology.

The Government supports the police using new technologies like facial recognition to protect the public. Whether and how they use it is an operational matter for the police in accordance with the legal framework, and they have published the results.

The College of Policing has published an Authorised Professional Practice, which provides national guidance and addresses the Court of Appeal judgment on Bridges vs South Wales Police. This includes details on how to measure accuracy, the requirement to comply with the public sector equality duty in relation to possible bias, the need for a human decision on whether and how to intervene following an alert for a possible match, and the deployment criteria.