Cops get more facial recognition vans as UK bets big on AI policing

Home Office white paper promises millions for LFR, a new Police.AI unit, and a bespoke legal framework

Police in England and Wales will increase their use of live facial recognition (LFR) and artificial intelligence (AI) under wide-ranging government plans to reform law enforcement.

A white paper [PDF] published by the Home Office on January 26 includes plans to fund 40 more LFR-equipped vans in addition to ten already in use. These will be used in "town centres and high crime hotspots" with the government planning to spend more than £26 million on a national facial recognition system and £11.6 million on LFR capabilities. It will also set up a bespoke legal framework for the technology's use.

London's Metropolitan Police has said its use of LFR led to 962 arrests from September 2024 to September 2025, with 203 deployments leading to 2,077 alerts including ten false positive identifications.

Writing in the Times, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said LFR's ability to identify people swiftly is "as revolutionary to modern policing as fingerprinting was a century ago."

The Met's use of the technology is being challenged at the High Court this week by anti-knife crime campaigner Shaun Thompson, supported by privacy group Big Brother Watch. Thompson was stopped by police officers who demanded his fingerprints after he was misidentified by LFR in Croydon last year.

AI is the Home Office's priority technology for policing with plans to spend £115 million over the next three years on a new National Centre for AI in Policing. The organization, to be known as Police.AI, will identity, test, and expand use of the technology across forces from this spring and publish a registry of use.

Police.AI will initially focus on automating administrative work, including analysis of CCTV footage, production of case files, and crime recording and classification. It will also build on tools developed by the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme, whose transcription tool - we're told - has saved more than 33,000 hours of investigators' time.

The Home Office wants forces to develop the use of digital contact channels as supplements to telephony, following the national introduction of online reporting of non-urgent incidents and video call responses to domestic abuse. It is piloting a service where a victim can message the officer in charge of their investigation and sees potential for greater use of AI chatbots, already used by a few forces.

It also wants to improve police data-handling by integrating information held within local and national systems through a new National Data Integration and Exploitation Service, use of national data standards and removing what it calls "all unnecessary barriers to sharing data."

This will require more technology and data specialists. The Home Office proposes a new direct entry route to senior policing ranks for those who are mid-career in other sectors and have transferable skills.

Structurally, the white paper proposes a new National Police Service for England and Wales that will tackle terrorism, serious and organized crime, and provide shared services including national IT capabilities, Police.AI, and a new national forensics service. "Our police reform programme set out in this white paper will for the first time enable proper national leadership of the digital, data, and technology infrastructure available to police officers and staff up and down the country," it says.

The government also plans to merge local police forces so as to greatly reduce their number from 43 at present, partly so that each force has stronger capabilities in areas including technology.

The devolved governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland run policing separately from England and Wales, with both having single national forces. ®