High Court Upholds Met Police Live Facial Recognition Use

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A High Court challenge against the Metropolitan Police 's use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology in London has been dismissed.

Youth worker Shaun Thompson, who was previously misidentified by the system, and Silkie Carlo of campaign group Big Brother Watch, spearheaded the legal action.

They voiced concerns that LFR could be used arbitrarily or in a discriminatory manner across the capital.

Lawyers representing the pair argued in court earlier this year that facial recognition data is "similar to a DNA profile," warning that proposed permanent installations would render it "impossible" for Londoners to move freely without their biometric data being routinely captured and processed.

Scotland Yard defended the legal challenge, telling the court in London that the policy was lawful.

Lord Justice Holgate and Mrs Justice Farbey said in a judgment on Tuesday: “In the context of promoting law and order in a large metropolis, the policy provides the claimants with an adequate indication of the circumstances in which LFR will be used and enables them to foresee, to a degree that is reasonable in the circumstances, the consequences of travelling in an area of London where LFR is in use.”

The judges also said that Mr Thompson and Ms Carlo’s human rights “have not been breached”.

The ruling comes after the government previously defended plans to expand the use of facial recognition across England and Wales.

Plans set out by the Home Office in January will increase the number of vans from 10 to 50 and make them available to all forces across the two nations.

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Scotland Yard defended the legal challenge, telling the court in London that the policy was lawful (Jordan Pettitt/PA)

Separate Freedom of Information disclosures to the Press Association suggest gaps in the force’s oversight of the technology.

In its response to the request, the Met said it has no system to identify complaints specifically relating to facial recognition, meaning any such cases could only be found by manually reviewing tens of thousands of complaint records.

It has also said it cannot readily track the outcomes of arrests made following facial recognition matches, including whether they result in charges or convictions, without examining individual case files across multiple systems.

Dan Squires KC, for Mr Thompson and Ms Carlo, told a hearing in January that the force used facial recognition 231 times last year and scanned around four million faces, scanning more than 50,000 faces in four-and-a-half hours in Oxford Circus in December.

He said the technology turns people’s facial characteristics into coded data, which is then compared with people on a “watch list”.

Anya Proops KC, for the Met, said in written submissions that locating individuals wanted by police was “akin to looking for stray needles in an enormous, exceptionally dense haystack”, and that facial recognition can “spot the ‘needles’ in a way that officers simply cannot”.

She continued that in 2025, up until September 18, officers made 801 arrests “specifically as a result of LFR” and that the intrusion into the public’s privacy is “only minimal”, adding that data taken from people not on a watchlist “is deleted a fraction of a second after it is created”.

In their 47-page ruling, Lord Justice Holgate and Mrs Justice Farbey said: “Any intrusion to which the claimants are exposed by the deployment of LFR is not directed at them in the sense that, save for unintended errors, the Metropolitan Police has no interest in their biometrics or in engaging with them.”

They also said that the “risk and potential scope for discrimination on grounds of race was no more than faintly asserted” at the hearing, adding: “We are not able to accept, on the thin submissions advanced before us, that concerns about discrimination infect the legality of the policy.”