UK Home Secretary pressed over delays to facial recognition legislation

In a one-off session today, the UK’s home secretary Shabana Mahmood MP was queried by a committee of the House of Lords. During the two-hour session, facial recognition use came up, in relation to both policing and its use by the private sector.

It’s an area where deployment, technological evolution and debate is moving far quicker than legislation and policy, which the Home Secretary acknowledged. For example, Biometric Update has covered how the Metropolitan Police is pursuing the roll out of new static LFR cameras in central London. And one of the “big four” supermarkets in Britain is tripling its Facewatch facial recognition deployment.

However, Mahmood is still “nailing down” policy details with the aim of establishing robust rules that will “stand up to the test of time.”

In December 2025, the UK Home Office began a 10-week public consultation on the use of facial recognition in law enforcement. Keir Starmer’s government officially set out its intention for facial recognition regulation as King Charles vocalized the law-making plans in the King’s Speech in May.

Mahmood remains as home secretary, one of the UK’s four great offices of state, even as her boss, Keir Starmer, is hanging on as caretaker prime minister. The one-off hearing today appeared to be a stock take from the Lords on her office’s progress on various issues. And she got a stern rebuke in relation to LFR.

“Would you just explain why it’s all taking so long? The consultation on this closed five months ago, and yet you’re still unable to tell us what’s actually going to happen,” Lord Foster of Bath, who chairs the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, pointedly asked of Mahmood.

“And just as an addition to that, given that you believe it is so important to have this legislative underpinning of the use of LFR, why have you allowed so many different forms of extension, for example, from mobile LFR equipment to fixed LFR equipment, without having a proper legal underpinning?”

Mahmood responded that she believes that there is a legal underpinning but that for consistent application across 43 police forces, with only around 18 forces using LFR in some form, there is need of a “robust legal framework” for broader application.

From the home secretary’s responses, the signals suggests policy is being worked over to “pre-empt the future” to quote the phrase Mahmood used during the hearing. The home secretary recognized the pace of change in technology in this area, how it is evolving rapidly.

The policy is not settled, she said, and it needs to be considered in more detail. She wants to pre-empt where the technology is headed. While pre-empting the future sounds like a fool’s errand, there was a certain logic behind it. Mahmood wants a framework that will have a certain dynamic aspect, a flexibility that would allow it to keep up with changes.

Every home secretary has a difficult and complex in-tray, while the Home Office is primarily charged with maintaining public safety, border security, immigration and civil registration. Policing and criminal justice falls firmly within Mahmood’s remit and her office is investing majorly in LFR for the police.

The police reform bill that Mahmood introduced calls for clearer rules and independent oversight for LFR use. A committee member asked her if it would extend beyond that, to private sector use. Mahmood referred to case law and legal proceedings that have set precedents around LFR use, common law powers, and wider responsibilities around data protection.

This will be codified in the police reform bill. The exact details of this police reform bill is still being worked on, she said. The home secretary referred to the consultation where a lot of the responses, according to her, focused on the need for a framework that is capable of keeping up with changes in the technology.

Broader transparency safeguards will be atop a body in charge of independent oversight, a single expert body will be necessary, she said. But how about if you’re a shop owner, the Lords Select Committee member pressed. This was a way to draw the home secretary back to private sector legislation, or the thinking around it, with a “shop owner” also potentially standing in for Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s, one of the large grocery supermarket chains.

“It’s not an unregulated space,” Mahmood said, referring to existing legislation around data protection. The implication is that her office is still mulling it over as the policy is not yet settled. Mahmood is receiving advice and she declined to go into detail on policy design during the session, which covered much else besides live facial recognition.

She defended her record on the time it is taking to come up with policy, and said we could expect more later this year. With a new prime minister expected in the autumn, we cannot be certain if Mahmood will remain in her office then. But whether she stays or is replaced, the Home Office’s deliberations on LFR use are likely to continue considering the technology’s growing use.

Article Topics

facial recognition  |  law enforcement  |  live facial recognition  |  retail biometrics  |  UK