Northern Ireland studies live facial recognition use by UK police

Northern Ireland may soon follow England and Wales in allowing police to use facial recognition to generate investigative leads based on biometric matches.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has established an internal Facial Recognition Governance Board to learn from live facial recognition programs around the UK. Those include implementations by London’s Met Police, South Wales Police and British Transport Police, The Irish News reports.

“At this stage, we are engaging with these programmes and their industry providers solely in order to assess operational feasibility,” the PSNI told the outlet in a statement. It added that a final decision on whether to deploy live facial recognition in Northern Ireland has not yet been made.

The Board’s efforts are described as “at an early exploratory and consultation stage.”

The consideration comes just as the UK government has announced its largest-ever expansion of facial recognition capabilities for police. That expansion includes increasing the number of live facial recognition vans from 10 to 50, and an investment of £115 million (US$157.3 million) to create a National Centre for AI in Policing.

And across the border in the Republic of Ireland, the government approved the use of facial recognition by police in certain conditions when it passed the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025 in December.

Article Topics

biometric matching  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  Ireland  |  law enforcement  |  live facial recognition  |  police