UK government has launched a £20 million ($25 million) competition for tech companies to provide live facial recognition to a number of police forces.
The procurement marks another step in the UK’s plans to introduce the controversial technology into policing and security services.
Via 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 facial recognition (LFR) software. Commercial frameworks aim to ease the buying process and lower costs across a pre-agreed set of suppliers. However, there are no guarantees public sector organizations will spend a specific value using the mechanism.
“The scope of the framework is for LFR software … 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,” the procurement notice explained this week. The maximum value of the framework is set at £20 million for the four-year duration of the agreement.
In an earlier prior information notice, BlueLight Commercial said that “for the purpose of this information request we require information for vehicle-based mobile LFR software only.”
The buying organization includes policing bodies representing the 43 forces of England and Wales, the College of Policing, Royal Gibraltar Police, Sovereign Base Areas Police (Cyprus), Civil Nuclear Constabulary, British Transport Police, Kent and Medway Town Fire Authority, Police Service of Northern Ireland, Ministry of Justice, Jersey Police Authority, and Humberside Fire and Rescue Service.
The government continues to favor the technology. Last year, Chris Philp MP, then minister for crime, policing and fire, said LFR could deter and detect crime in public settings that attract large crowds. He called for a doubling of spending on facial recognition technology in policing, including both live and retrospective facial recognition, which relies on an image taken at a crime scene – using CCTV, police cameras, or phone footage – to scan police databases to find a match.
LFR uses real-time footage from events, which is checked against a pre-defined target list of known criminals or suspects.
The new Labour government, elected in July, looks unlikely to change course. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Keir Starmer backed a wider rollout of facial recognition technology to track and prevent “thugs” from traveling to areas where they plan to cause unrest following summer riots over immigration.
However, privacy concerns about the introduction of the technology remain. Campaign group Big Brother Watch noted that the Metropolitan Police had used LFR four times more this year than in the previous three years combined. The expansion “poses one of the most severe threats to privacy in a generation,” said director Silkie Carlo.
Last year, MPs heard how a report from Dr Tony Mansfield, principal research scientist, National Physical Laboratory, showed that a system used by the Met Police exhibited bias against Black individuals when “run at low thresholds and easy thresholds.” ®
