Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the news story entitled Live Facial Recognition technology to catch high-harm offenders, published on 13 August 2025, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of extending the use of this capability from Bedfordshire to the tri-force area that includes Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire.

The Home Office has funded the roll-out of ten live facial recognition (LFR) vans to seven host police forces, with Bedfordshire Police being one of those forces. Access to the LFR vans is available to all forces including Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, subject to operational need and local decision-making.

No formal assessment is therefore needed by the government as the capability is already available to those forces should they choose to deploy it.