Greater Manchester Police

Greater Manchester Police uses both live facial recognition and retrospective facial recognition. The Information Commissioner's Office audited the force between June 2025 and March 2026 as one of five in a consensual audit programme, publishing its executive summary on 18 August 2026.

The two ratings differ, and the gap is the substantive finding. GMP received reasonable assurance of compliance for live facial recognition, but only LIMITED assurance for retrospective facial recognition. The ICO attributed that lower rating to the absence of a policy governing the force's use of the Police National Database, and to a lack of defined roles for using the technology.

That is the clearest single illustration of the audit programme's broader finding that compliance is weaker for retrospective searching than for live deployment, despite live deployment attracting far more public and legal scrutiny.

On accuracy, the force states that in more than one million scans a single individual has been misidentified, a Caucasian woman at the Manchester Marathon. That figure is the force's own. GMP says officers are present at deployments to explain the technology to the public, that alerts are reviewed by trained officers before any action is taken, and that data from non-matches is deleted within seconds.

Across all five audited forces the ICO made 107 recommendations, all accepted or partially accepted, and each force has submitted an action plan.