Will Scotland be the first nation to pass primary legislation covering live FRT?

The Scottish privacy commissioner continues to express consternation over the potential use of live facial recognition by Police Scotland. Meanwhile, a mobile option for police facial matching is raising new concerns.

According to a report in the Scotsman, live facial recognition is now being used by 13 forces across England and Wales. In the first four months of 2026, the London Metropolitan police used it to scan more than 1.7 million faces.

The tech has not yet been adopted by Scottish police, and there is no clear timeline for deployment; a detailed business case is not expected until 2027, and a consultation would follow. But, as face biometrics technology continues to find pick-up by UK law enforcement agencies, calls for a ban on live FRT have gotten louder.

Scotland’s commissioner, Dr. Brian Plastow, has gone on record saying facial recognition is “nowhere near as effective as the police claim it is,” and suggested that “patchwork” laws regulating the technology are insufficient.

Alasdair Hay, chair of the Scottish Police Authority’s policing performance committee, has said that, to use facial recognition, the force would be required to produce “a bespoke code of practice, and demonstrate compliance with the biometrics commissioner’s own code.”

Mobile OIFR puts power of facial recognition in police hands

In a recent column for Update, former UK Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Fraser Sampson argues that the UK needs a Biometric Surveillance Act. “LFR isn’t a plug-and-play upgrade and crossbreeding biometrics with old school surveillance technology is ill-advised,” Sampson writes.

Many others agree with him. An article from Liberty Investigates interrogates what it calls “a significant expansion of the police’s use of facial recognition.” It points specifically to the case of Merseyside Police, “one of several forces to give officers access to handheld facial recognition technology, known as operator-initiated facial recognition (OIFR).”

OIFR enables mobile facial recognition through a smartphone camera via connection to police databases. It has already been adopted by police in South Wales and Gwent. Metropolitan police are planning to run a trial. The piece cites a Home Office report published in February, which references “a new, national Home Office facial matching service” with “the ability to support operator-initiated facial recognition searches on a national level”.

By contrast, live facial recognition uses live video footage from static cameras installed in public places. Per the report, “in December the government announced an expansion of facial recognition technology with the aim for it to be used more by all 43 police forces in England and Wales.” In February 2026, it launched a pilot of live facial recognition at railway stations, with an initial deployment at London Bridge station.

Despite the mountain evidence that either live FRT or OIFR are likely to be adopted by forces across the UK, a spokesperson from the Home Office tells Liberty Investigates that “there are no Home Office plans to roll out operator‑initiated facial recognition nationally,” and that “decisions on using handheld or officer‑initiated facial recognition remain a matter for individual police forces.”

Scottish privacy commissioner: ‘have mercy on me’

Scotland could be moving to become the first nation to pass primary legislation around the biometric surveillance technology. The Scotsman argues that “a fit-for-purpose law is the best way of establishing clear boundaries around its potential use.”

In a letter sent to Audrey Nicoll MSP, convenor of the Scottish Parliament Criminal Justice Committee, Plastow says that, while “primary legislation would undoubtedly provide the ‘gold standard’ for LFR in Scotland, there is currently no country in the world which has passed comprehensive and specific primary legislation dedicated exclusively to governing the police use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) in public spaces.”

However, in the absence of primary legislation (which Plastow supports), any future use of live facial recognition technology “would inevitably be highly contested by civil and human rights organisations and data subjects and would result in a significant increase in complaints to my office relative to the Code of Practice.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  law enforcement  |  legislation  |  live facial recognition  |  Operator Initiated Facial Recognition (OIFR)  |  Police Scotland  |  real-time biometrics  |  Scotland  |  Scottish Biometrics Commissioner