UK police have been allowed to search the nation’s passport and immigration databases since at least 2020, and Big Brother Watch has discovered that the number of searches carried out has been increasing dramatically. The disclosure of the secret system’s increasingly frequent use has prompted bi-partisan outrage.
A previous investigation by Liberty Investigates and The Telegraph found police have been running facial recognition against the passport database since 2019, and that the practice had accelerated after then-Policing Minister Chris Philp suggested passport and immigration data should be used in investigations of shoplifting, burglary and theft. Privacy International notes the Home Office has since denied the databases are used to investigate those crimes.
Big Brother Watch filed Freedom of Information (FoI) requests which revealed that police searches of the passport database began with 2 in 2020, but reached 417 in 2023. The immigration database was searched 16 times in 2023 and 102 times in 2024, according to Big Brother Watch.
The figures for the passport database end in October, 2024, but indicate police had performed 377 searches of the two civilian databases in the first 9 months of the year. Immigration search figures end in mid-May of this year, showing 34 searches in the first four-and-a-half months of 2025. Biometric Update reported in May that UK police had searched Home Office’s immigration database 110 times in the past year.
The databases contain an estimated 150 million photos, combined, 58 million of them for biometric passports. They were enrolled in a facial recognition library without parliament being informed, and no public policy has been published to govern the searches.
Silkie Carlo and Nuno Guerreiro de Sousa have contacted the Home Office and London’s Met Police to call for a moratorium on facial recognition searches against the two databases, on behalf of Big Brother Watch and Privacy International, respectively. Home Office said it is working on formulating a policy.
Retrospective or “forensic” facial recognition searches are supposed to use the Police National Database (PND) for reference photos. That database contains roughly 20 million images of people who have been previously arrested or declared persons of interest,
It has been 13 years since Home Office was told by the high court that storing the images of people acquitted of crimes is unlawful, but they are still in the PND. Biometrics Commissioners for both the UK and Scotland have noted the damage the retention of unlawful biometric data has on public trust.
De Sousa, senior technologist at Privacy International, argues that bypassing public and parliamentary scrutiny renders the concept of “policing by consent” hollow.
The revelations come just as Labour-led Parliament is considering the Crime and Policing Bill, which picks up a plan from the previous Conservative government to allow police to search the national database of driving licenses with facial recognition.
Politicians gonna posture
Big Brother Watch found opposition among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Conservative MP and former Brexit Secretary Sir David Davis called it an “extraordinary surveillance system” and said “(i)t’s outrageous that parliamentarians and the public have been kept in the dark about” its existence.
“This is an utterly improper misuse of our personal data that nobody gave permission for. It appears to have no judicial check or oversight. It frankly deserves to be struck down.”
Davis also said the move is “reminiscent” of Tony Blair’s national ID card and DNA database ambitions.
“For the Home Office to have converted millions of innocent people’s passport photos into a police facial recognition database is bad enough for our freedoms,” Labour Peer and former Shadow Attorney General Baroness Shami Chakrabarti says. “That the last government allowed this without public debate, let alone parliamentary authority, is a national scandal. The risk of discrimination, misidentification and abuse is vast and anyone who believes in the infallibility of software should remember the postmasters. The new government should put this right urgently so that the courts don’t have to.”
Detention matches LFR fears, not suspect
A London man is suing Met Police for gross mistreatment after a false match with the force’s live facial recognition technology when he was returning from volunteer community work dedicated to reducing knife crime.
Shaun Thompson was detained for 20 minutes and asked to submit fingerprint biometrics in 2024, as the BBC reported at the time, and released only after presenting his passport. Thompson was volunteering with community organization Street Fathers.
Now, Thompson, who is Black, has received High Court permission to sue the Met Police , and Big Brother Watch is supporting him, in part by crowdfunding to cover his legal costs.
Met Police have said that its LFR produces false matches at a rate of about 1 in 33,000 scans, but as a fraction of matches, which is how false match rate (FMR) is calculated, the figure is closer to 1in 40. The systems accuracy has reportedly improved, with Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp claiming last year it is 4500 times less likely to result in inappropriate detention than “regular stop and search.”
Former UK Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Fraser Sampson notes that the technology being rolled out at Notting Hill for Carnival is much more accurate than when it was first deployed there in 2016. The policy has come a long way too, and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced in July that a governance framework for police use of live facial recognition is currently in development.
However, Sampson cautions that “clumsy experimentation has haunted the adoption” of all forms of facial recognition. And the hauntings continue.
Article Topics
Big Brother Watch | biometric matching | biometrics | facial recognition | identity management | London Metropolitan Police | Privacy International | UK