British Transport Police

A time-limited trial running from February 2026 to November 2026, first deployed at London Bridge and extended to the London Underground with a deployment at Victoria station on 11 August 2026.

The effectiveness evidence here is the most striking thing about this entry, and stands in sharp contrast to the Metropolitan Police's figures for the same technology family. Across 18 deployments between February and July 2026, British Transport Police logged more than 530,000 faces scanned, zero true matches, no arrests attributable to LFR, and one confirmed false alert at King's Cross on 24 February. The Met, by comparison, reported 173 arrests from roughly 470,000 faces at Croydon over a broadly comparable period.

That divergence is worth recording plainly rather than resolving: the same class of technology, deployed by two forces in the same country in the same year, has produced radically different yields. Watchlist composition and deployment siting are the obvious candidate explanations, but neither force has published enough for that to be more than inference.

British Transport Police's own facial recognition page states that the force "currently utilises NEC's NeoFace M40 algorithm facial recognition technology", so the engine is now confirmed by a force document rather than by secondary reporting alone.

Update, October 2026. The first phase ran from February to July 2026 across 18 deployments at London railway stations. It scanned more than 500,000 faces and produced one watchlist alert, which was a false match; no arrests resulted directly from an alert. Reported cost was more than £320,000 and nearly 100 hours of police time. British Transport Police extended the trial into London Underground stations from 11 August 2026 (Victoria first), rotating with Network Rail stations, until November 2026. The force says associated arrests made during deployments are excluded from its LFR figures because they did not come from an alert.

Update, November 2026. British Transport Police's own page states that the pilot runs for six months from 11 February 2026 at selected key transport hubs in London. It says deployments will comply with the Data Protection Act 2018, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010, and that oversight comes from internal governance and external engagement with ethics and independent advisory groups. It says independent testing of the algorithm, commissioned by the Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police, was carried out with the National Physical Laboratory. The force states that it does not presently use operator-initiated facial recognition, and the retrospective facial recognition section of the page is marked "documents to follow". The version of the page read for this review listed a deployment on 11 June 2026 and had not been updated for the August extension, so the November end of the trial rests on the force's August announcement and trade reporting. As of 3 November 2026 no results for the Underground phase, and no decision on what follows the trial, had been published in the sources read.