UK police ask for more funds as it expands facial recognition use

UK’s police chiefs have asked the government to commit £220 million (US$296 million) annually for the next three years to support investment into science and technology projects, including live facial recognition rollouts.

The investments could free up an extra 41,000 hours of police time each day in England and Wales – time that could be spent on crime prevention, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) said on Thursday. Live facial recognition (LFR) units, for instance, helped the police speed up investigations, leading to an average of 60 arrests per month throughout 2024.

“A decade with very limited capital investment into policing has meant prioritizing maintaining existing technology over innovation,” says NPCC Chair Gavin Stephens. “The vast majority of police force technology budgets are spent on aging systems and simply keeping the lights on. This has to change.”

The police are already planning to spend nearly £2 billion ($1.4 billion) on digital technology and data and analytics in the next financial year, according to NPPC. The additional funds would be used for several projects, which aside from live facial recognition include developing deepfake detection capabilities.

The police also want to invest in a new national digital forensics platform for examining digital devices as well as a national Data and Analytics Office, dedicated to data quality and sharing as well as developing predictive analytics to identify unsafe areas.

The NPCC has published a fresh version of the National Policing Digital Strategy 2025-2030. The paper recommends that Police and Crime Commissioners and Chief Constables work on governance and ethics frameworks for technologies such as AI and facial recognition.

UK police to install fixed LFR cameras

Meanwhile, media investigations show that the UK police are already ramping up their use of live facial recognition with the first fixed cameras expected this summer in Croydon, south London.

In 2024, police forces used the technology to scan nearly 4.7 million faces, almost two times more than the previous year, according to an investigation published by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates.

Vans equipped with LFR cameras were deployed at least 256 times during last year, jumping from 63 times in 2023, official records have shown. The police plans to increase their capacity over the next days with a roving unit of 10 LFR vans that can be deployed across the country. The Metropolitan Police, which is the UK’s largest police force, has four vans. Police authorities are also considering installing fixed LFR cameras in the West End of London.

The use of retrospective facial recognition, in which faces are matched with the police national database (PND), is also rising, from 138,720 in 2023 to 252,798 in 2024. The police have conducted over 1,000 facial recognition searches through the UK passport database in the last two years. The secretive practice has proved controversial, sparking concerns among members of the British parliament and watchdogs.

The police also performed 110 searches through the Home Office immigration database during the last year. The Home Office is now working on a new national facial recognition system, known as the Strategic Facial Matching (SFM) Project, which will be able to search multiple databases, per the media report.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  facial recognition  |  London Metropolitan Police  |  police  |  real-time biometrics  |  South Wales Police  |  Strategic Facial Matching (SFM) Project  |  UK