UK government announces tender for live facial recognition technology

The UK government has published a £20 million procurement for tech companies to provide live facial recognition technology (FRT) to police forces across the UK.

Through BlueLight Commercial, a non-profit commercial consortium representing police and other emergency services, the government has issued a tender notice to establish a national multi-supplier framework for the provision of live FRT. The Scope of the framework is for “real-time deployment of facial recognition technology, which compares a live camera feed (or multiple feeds) of faces against predetermined watchlists, to locate persons of interest by generating an alert when a possible match is found”.

This announcement marks another step the UK government is taking in pursuing plans to introduce and sustain the use of this highly invasive technology into policing across the UK. Yet, they continue to do so while there is no legal framework in place pertaining to the use of FRT. As well as the significant threats it poses to human rights including our right to privacy, right to protest and freedom from discrimination.

The announcement follows developments this past year by both the current and previous government to fund and enable the deployment of facial recognition on our streets by the police and private companies.

Furthermore, this tender has been published just a week after significant concerns were raised about the use of facial recognition by police were raised in a debate in parliament, during which Members of Parliament (MPs) and the Minister for Policing, Fire and Crime Prevention, Diane Johnson, acknowledged concerns about the lack of a specific legal framework for the technology’s use. Following the debate we wrote to the MPs who intervened asking them to table a written and/or oral question to the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Minister for Policing to call on them to take steps to bring forward the necessary restrictions and safeguards required for the use of FRT.

This solidifies the need to mobilise the public to call on their local MP to take action against this rapid rise of the use of FRT on our streets. That’s why we launched our campaign ‘The End of Privacy in Public’ to allow the public to write to their MP to find out if FRT is being used in their local area.