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- Neil Gray will monitor Westminster's draft biometrics legislation and assess its applicability for Scotland.
- Brian Plastow urged primary legislation to create a statutory framework for limited, proportionate live facial recognition.
- Scottish policing is at least two years from a workable business case for LFR; Scottish government views primary legislation as premature.
- Plastow warns England and Wales introduced LFR within a legal vacuum and advocates Scotland choose legislative legitimacy and accountability.
Scotland will ensure that any police use of facial recognition technology is “lawful, effective, proportionate and grounded in respect for human rights,” according to the Scottish justice secretary.
Writing to Scottish biometrics commissioner Brian Plastow – who urged the Scottish government in late May 2026 to introduce primary legislation for the police use of live facial-recognition (LFR) technology – Neil Gray, the cabinet secretary for justice, said the Scottish government will actively be monitoring how Westminster approaches the development of a new legal framework for the use of biometrics in law enforcement.
Gray also said that while Scottish policing bodies are at least two years away from having a workable business case for the technology, he has taken note of Plastow’s “view that the introduction of primary legislation to Parliament would represent the optimal approach to establishing a statutory basis and enabling framework for the limited and proportionate use of LFR by Police Scotland”.
Gray added although it would be “premature” for the Scottish government to commit to primary legislation on LFR given these circumstances, it stands ready to work with Plastow and others to ensure that any use of the technology is “lawful, effective, proportionate and grounded in respect for human rights”.
He further added that any draft legislation for police biometrics published in England and Wales will be “carefully assessed” by the Scottish government for both its applicability and implications.
The clarification on how Scotland will approach police LFR follows the Kings Speech in mid-May 2026, which set out the intention of Westminster to bring forward legislation in this session of Parliament.
Writing to the justice secretary on 26 May, Plastow noted that because rapid advances in technology tend to outpace the law, their deployment in a law enforcement context also means they tend to “emerge and proliferate” in a legal vacuum, as exemplified by the situation with LFR in England and Wales.
Highlighting Home Office plans to massively expand its funding and use of LFR and other artificial intelligence (AI)-powered biometrics, Plastow added it would be “inconceivable” that Police Scotland would not want access to the same technologies.
He added the technology could be particularly helpful in, for example, dealing with serious organised crime, counter-terror policing operations, county-lines drug dealing, and as part of a strategic response to the national emergency of male violence towards women and girls.
“[However,] in England and Wales, the approach has been to put the cart before the horse as evidenced by the technology being introduced within a legal vacuum with primary legislation proposed only after the home secretary has already made a funding decision to support its adoption and roll out to all police forces in England and Wales,” he wrote.
“Therefore, my purpose in writing to you is to advocate a different approach for Scotland and to ask ministers to consider bringing forward primary legislation in Scotland to create a statutory basis and enabling framework for the limited and proportionate use of LFR in Scotland by Police Scotland within legislative guardrails approved by the Scottish Parliament for its use.”
He said that unlike in England and Wales, this approach could help “establish legal and democratic legitimacy as well as public accountability”, adding while there are other routes to introducing police LFR in Scotland (such as through the biometrics commissioner’s Statutory Code of Practice introduced in November 2022), this would “carry less democratic legitimacy and accountability and would not be exposed to full Parliamentary debate”.
Gray responded to Plastow that such an alternative route would still require Scottish ministers to approve changes to the Code of Practice and “lay draft affirmative regulations” to bring those revisions into effect – a process that would still be open to Parliamentary scrutiny if the Scottish Parliament decides to exercise it.
LFR in England and Wales
While the use of LFR by police in England and Wales – beginning with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has already ramped up massively in recent years, there has so far been minimal public debate or consultation, with the Home Office claiming for years that there is already “comprehensive” legal framework in place.
However, in December 2025, the Home Office launched a 10-week consultation on the use of LFR by UK police, allowing interested parties and members of the public to share their views on how the controversial technology should be regulated.
At the start of its LFR consultation – which the Home Office is still yet to formally respond to – the department said although a “patchwork” legal framework for police facial recognition exists (including for the increasing use of the retrospective and “operator-initiated” versions of the technology), it does not give police themselves the confidence to “use it at significantly greater scale … nor does it consistently give the public the confidence that it will be used responsibly”.
It added that the current rules governing police LFR use are “complicated and difficult to understand”, and that an ordinary member of the public would be required to read four pieces of legislation, police national guidance documents and a range of detailed legal or data protection documents from individual forces to fully understand the basis for LFR use on their high streets.
Responding to Plastow, Gray said: “While the findings of the UK government’s consultation, and its formal response, are still to be published, the finer detail of any draft legislation once published will be carefully assessed by the Scottish Government in terms of their applicability to, and implications for, Scotland.”
However, despite not having even formally responded to the consultation – and before the now-dismissed judicial review case against the Met’s use of the technology had even been heard – the Home Office announced sweeping reform to UK policing in January 2026, which included significant investment into the LFR capabilities of police in England and Wales.
Computer Weekly has contacted the Home Office on two occasions about when it will publicly respond to the consultation but is yet to receive a response.
Consultation response so far
Despite this, many organisations – including regulatory bodies, civil society groups and academics – have begun posting their consultation responses online.
While a consensus is emerging around the need for clear regulatory requirements around, for example, oversight, safeguards and what constitutes proportionate use, there are also points of divergence, particularly over how high thresholds should be set for the police use of powerful biometric technologies.
For example, while some say these technologies are valid and valuable policing tools, others have argued that the level of intrusion on people’s rights means there are exceedingly few cases, if any, where they should be allowed.
However, all responses published so far agreed that, given the threats to rights presented by biometric surveillance technologies, it is not an option to continue without a dedicated legal framework.
For William Webster, the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner for England and Wales, the success of any new framework is dependent on effective oversight by “an independent regulatory body with adequate powers and resources to conduct its business and particularly to enable appropriate use of technology and to identify and sanction unlawful activities”.
He added in his consultation response that the scope for both individual and society-level harms mean voluntary self-regulator “will not be sufficient to ensure compliance with standards”, and that any new regulator “must make compliance mandatory, offer proactive oversight with an inspection and compliance regime, and be able to enact swift remedies where compliance is not evident”.
Webster also said the regulator must be empowered to publish codes of practice to operationalise the key principles of the framework, including reasonableness, proportionality and assessment of harm.
There have been repeated calls from both Parliament and civil society over many years for the police’s use of facial recognition to be regulated.
This includes three separate inquiries by the Justice and Home Affairs Committee into shoplifting, police algorithms and police facial recognition; two of the UK’s former biometrics commissioners, Paul Wiles and Fraser Sampson; an independent legal review by Matthew Ryder QC; the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission; and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which called for a moratorium on live facial recognition as far back as July 2019.
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