Thames Valley Police

Two fully equipped LFR vans entered service on Monday 22 December 2025, first deployed on Cornmarket Street in Oxford city centre. The Police and Crime Commissioner announced the launch on 29 December 2025 and stated the vans would be used across the Thames Valley frequently.

No supplier is named in the announcement, and no statutory authority or independent oversight body is identified. The Commissioner refers to working with the force to ensure safeguards are in place, and to trained operators, bespoke watchlists and automatic deletion of non-matching data, but those are descriptions of practice rather than an oversight arrangement, so the legal basis and oversight fields are left empty rather than filled from inference.

The site's own news archive already carries reporting of subsequent deployments in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, so the deployment was being covered before this record existed.

Update, November 2026. Hello Radio (19 May 2026) reports the Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner, Matthew Barber, saying that since December 2025 the vans had led to 17 arrests across 13 deployments, scanned more than 240,000 faces and generated 35 alerts, and that the force needs to review how the vans are used because operations are very resource intensive and may be better suited to finding people in large crowds. The report does not say use was paused, and the vans were due to deploy in Oxford that day. These are figures as given by the Commissioner in a news report; the original statement was not read. Supplier, legal basis and oversight remain unestablished.