Home Office

The Home Office states the Act does not itself create a process for searching the DVLA image gallery to identify unknown individuals, and that which non-police galleries may be searched is deferred to a forthcoming Police Reform Bill.

Over 25,000 retrospective facial recognition searches are run each month against a pool of more than 19 million custody images.

The statutory position changed in 2026 and any account citing only the absence of a framework is now stale. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 opened police access to DVLA driver records including photographs; the Lords rejected an amendment to block facial recognition searching of the roughly 50 million image DVLA database by 123 votes to 40 in March 2026. The substantive framework for which galleries may be searched has been deferred to a further bill.

The National Physical Laboratory published an accuracy and equitability evaluation of Cognitec FaceVACS-DBScan ID v5.5 in December 2025, and the ICO's 18 August 2026 statement is explicit about the finding: the algorithm's bias increases the likelihood of incorrect matches for people in some demographic groups. The Home Office and NPCC have put mitigations in place (staff training, oversight reporting, equality impact assessments) alongside plans to replace the algorithm. The ICO continues to engage with HMICFRS, the Home Office and NPCC on the replacement and is reserving the right to take further regulatory action if warranted.

A Home Office consultation on the facial recognition framework closed on 12 February 2026 with a government response promised within 12 weeks. That response remained unpublished more than three months past its due date as of August 2026; a July 2026 Lords session shows the Home Secretary being directly pressed on the delay.

Recorded as one body: the Home Office provides the Police National Database facial search that forces use. Forces with their own retrospective facial recognition systems are recorded separately.

Update, November 2026. The Home Office's published summary of the National Physical Laboratory evaluation (4 December 2025) states that the algorithm tested is the one used to search the Police National Database of about 19 million custody images, that forces run roughly 25,000 searches a month, that a match is returned in over 99 per cent of searches where the true match is in the gallery at the operational setting, and that in a limited set of circumstances it is more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups. The Home Office states that a new algorithm has been procured and independently tested, and that HMICFRS, supported by the Forensic Science Regulator, would inspect the system, with work expected to start before the end of March 2026. The Register reported on 8 December 2025 that the ICO had "only learned last week" of the historical bias, named the planned replacement as Idemia MBSS FR, and quoted a Home Office spokesperson saying the new algorithm would be tested early the following year. The Cognitec summary page does not name the replacement, but a separate Home Office summary published the same day reports National Physical Laboratory testing of "the version of the IDEMIA MBSS FR algorithm selected for deployment by the Home Office" for a new national facial matching service. No HMICFRS inspection report and no operational go-live date for the replacement were found. The Home Secretary told a House of Lords committee on 7 July 2026 that the legal framework policy was still being refined; no published response to the consultation was found in the sources read as of 3 November 2026. The ICO statement of 18 August 2026 cited above could not be read in this review.