Facts
Live facial recognition (LFR) captures passers-by on camera, converts their facial features into biometric values and compares them with a police watchlist; unmatched data is deleted immediately. On 23 February 2024, near London Bridge station, the first claimant, a volunteer community worker, was stopped and questioned after LFR matched him with his brother, who was on the watchlist. He was asked to prove his identity and threatened with arrest when he declined to give fingerprints. The second claimant, director of Big Brother Watch, regularly attends protests and visits areas where LFR is used. Both challenged the Metropolitan Police’s LFR policy adopted on 11 September 2024.
Question
The claimants did not argue that LFR is unlawful in principle and raised no proportionality challenge. They argued that the policy left officers so much discretion over who could be placed on watchlists and where LFR could be deployed that interferences with Article 8 ECHR were not “in accordance with the law”, and restrictions on Articles 10 and 11 were not “prescribed by law”. The question was whether the policy had the necessary quality of law, meaning foreseeability and safeguards against arbitrariness, in light of the Court of Appeal’s 2020 judgment in Bridges against South Wales Police.
Decision
Holgate LJ and Farbey J dismissed the claim on both grounds. The policy ties key watchlist categories to the offence types relevant to the small “crime hotspot” areas where LFR may be deployed, protects other categories (such as people wanted by the courts) through other requirements, limits its use to locating sought persons, and sets out a structured proportionality assessment with practical guidance on privacy and on the chilling effect on protest. Read as a whole, these interlocking “why, who and where” requirements gave sufficient clarity and protection against arbitrary decisions. The court contrasted Bridges, where it had been unclear who could be watchlisted or where LFR could be used. It stressed that it was not ruling on the merits of LFR.
Why it matters
The case tested a police LFR policy against the quality-of-law standard applied in Bridges. The judgment indicates that police can meet the quality-of-law requirement through a detailed published policy, without a dedicated statute, provided the policy constrains where LFR is deployed and who is placed on watchlists. Because the claimants raised neither proportionality nor the public sector equality duty, those questions remain open. The claimants announced that they would seek to appeal; as of October 2026 no decision on permission to appeal had been reported.
Related stages
In R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police [2020] EWCA Civ 1058 the Court of Appeal found South Wales Police’s use of LFR unlawful, partly because too much discretion was left to officers over watchlists and locations. The Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened in the present case with written submissions.