High Court upholds Met facial recognition policy as London face scans pass 1.7 million

The High Court of England and Wales ruled on 21 April 2026 that the Metropolitan Police Service may keep scanning the faces of people walking through London streets. In The King (Shaun Thompson and Silkie Carlo) v The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2026] EWHC 915 (Admin), Lord Justice Holgate and Mrs Justice Farbey unanimously dismissed a judicial review of the force's live facial recognition policy, adopted on 11 September 2024.

The claim was narrower than the public argument around it. The claimants did not say facial recognition is unlawful in principle, and did not challenge the proportionality of any particular deployment. They argued the policy failed the "in accordance with the law" requirement in Articles 8, 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, because it left officers too much discretion over where, why and against whom the technology is pointed. The court rejected that. Read as a whole, it found, the policy contains "clear, interlocking and cumulative constraints", confining deployment to three defined use cases: crime and missing person hotspots, protective security operations, and deployments driven by specific intelligence. Anything outside those cases is not permitted. The court described the resulting chain of command as "a far cry from the 'hunch' or 'professional intuition' of an individual officer".

The first claimant knows the failure mode. On 23 February 2024, near London Bridge, the system matched him to a watchlist image of his brother. He was stopped, questioned, asked to prove who he was, and threatened with arrest when he declined to give fingerprints. He later received a payment from the Met. He said on the day of the judgment that his bank cards and passport were not enough to convince officers the technology was wrong, and that he would appeal to stop the tool becoming mass surveillance. Big Brother Watch, whose director was the second claimant, is crowdfunding that appeal.

The court was blunt about the evidence put before it. Large parts of the second claimant's witness statements were excluded or given no weight, the court holding she had adopted the role of an advocate and offered opinion rather than admissible fact. Permission to rely on expert reports from Professor Utley was refused on the basis that they addressed the reach and effectiveness of the technology rather than the lawfulness of the policy. The court warned that irrelevant evidence wastes court time.

The accuracy figures in the judgment are the Met's own. Between 1 January and 10 September 2024, the system produced one false alert per 33,435 faces scanned, with 2.1 per cent of all alerts false. Between 11 September and 31 December 2024, 453 alerts were generated with no false alerts recorded. Between 1 January and 10 October 2025 there were 12 false alerts, four of which led to no police engagement. The matching threshold was raised from 0.6 to 0.64 in July 2024.

What the judgment settles and what is happening on the ground are different questions. Statewatch reported on 12 June 2026, drawing on Guardian figures, that Essex Police scanned 2.2 million faces across 2024 and 2025 for 117 arrests, and that London recorded 1.7 million scans and 44 arrests in the first four months of 2026. A fixed camera pilot in Croydon scanned close to 500,000 faces in six months for one false alert. At least 12 forces in England and Wales have now deployed it, four of them for the first time in the six months to June 2026, and the technology was used at a protest in London for the first time in mid May 2026. On 26 January 2026 the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, published a policing white paper funding 40 more facial recognition vans and 115 million pounds over three years for a national policing artificial intelligence centre, alongside a promise of a bespoke legal framework.

Writing on 8 May 2026, Dr William Page of Birmingham Law School called the challenge surprisingly narrow. The court did not decide whether deployments are necessary, whether patterns of deployment in ethnic minority areas breach equality law, whether reusing watchlists across locations is arbitrary, or how the policy would apply to permanent camera networks. No Public Sector Equality Duty ground was argued.

Australia has taken the opposite regulatory route on the retail side of the same technology. On 18 September 2025 the Privacy Commissioner, Carly Kind, determined that Kmart Australia breached the Privacy Act 1988 by collecting biometric information from everyone entering 28 stores between June 2020 and July 2022 without consent. That followed the Bunnings determination of October 2024, covering 62 stores, which is under review at the Administrative Review Tribunal.

What remains unknown is whether the Court of Appeal will take the case, what the Home Office consultation that closed in February 2026 concluded, and whether Parliament will legislate before the vans arrive.