The takeaway: Live facial recognition is expanding across England and Wales faster than the law meant to govern it is being written — and on Tuesday the Lords said so to the Home Secretary's face. "Why is it all taking so long?" asked the committee chair; the consultation closed five months ago, vans are becoming fixed cameras, and the promised legal framework is still pencilled for later this year. Underneath sits a genuinely hard story: arrest numbers the police call transformative, a court split on lawfulness, and a technology that arrived before its rulebook.

Tuesday in the Lords

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood gave two hours of evidence to the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday, and the sharpest exchange — reported by Biometric Update; the official transcript isn't published yet — was on live facial recognition. Committee chair Lord Foster of Bath: "Would you just explain why it's all taking so long? The consultation on this closed five months ago, and yet you're still unable to tell us what's actually going to happen." And the follow-through: given the government believes legislative underpinning is so important, "why have you allowed so many different forms of extension, for example, from mobile LFR equipment to fixed LFR equipment, without having a proper legal underpinning?"

Mahmood's answers, per the report: existing law — case law, common-law powers, data protection duties — provides an underpinning; she is still "nailing down" the details, aiming for rules that will "stand up to the test of time"; consistent application across 43 police forces needs a "robust legal framework", which will be codified in the Police Reform Bill, with an independent oversight body expected; and more, she said, can be expected later this year.

The gap the question lives in

The Home Office consultation on a legal framework ran from 4 December 2025 to 12 February 2026. Five months on, its outcome page still reads "We are analysing your feedback." What hasn't waited is deployment: in January, Mahmood announced an expansion from 10 vans to 50 — enough for every force in England and Wales — inside a £140m police-technology package; the Met's fixed-camera pilot in Croydon ran through March; and static cameras across the West End and Soho are planned by the end of 2026. The framework is chasing the rollout, not preceding it — which was precisely Lord Foster's point.

What the numbers say — both directions

The police case is built on results. The Croydon pilot: 173 arrests over 24 operations — "one arrest every 35 minutes" — with more than 470,000 people passing the cameras and, per the Met, a single false alert; arrestees included people wanted for kidnap and rape. By April, the Met was citing more than 2,100 arrests since the start of 2024. "These results show why live facial recognition is such a powerful tool when it's used carefully, openly and in the right places," said Lindsey Chiswick, the Met's and national lead for live facial recognition.

The other direction is about what the scanning does to everyone who isn't wanted. The Ada Lovelace Institute's assessment, from its May 2025 report on biometrics governance — a warning that predates the current expansion by a year: "It is not credible to say that there is a sufficient legal framework in place" — the rollout "exists in a legal grey area, undermining accountability, transparency and public trust." Big Brother Watch's advocacy manager Matthew Feeney called January's van expansion "one of the most significant threats to civil liberties in the history of British policing". And Shaun Thompson — misidentified by the Met's system in 2024 and later compensated — puts the individual cost plainly: "No one should be treated like a criminal due to a computer error."

The courts are split — and that's the legal story

The reason "is it lawful?" has no clean answer: in Bridges v South Wales Police (2020), the Court of Appeal found that force's LFR use unlawful, citing "fundamental deficiencies" in the legal framework — too much discretion over who goes on watchlists and where cameras deploy. But in April this year, the High Court upheld the Met's current policy in Thompson and Carlo, finding "clear, interlocking and cumulative constraints" whose oversight it called "a far cry" from the "hunch" of an individual officer — and distinguishing Bridges as fixed. The claimants — Thompson among them — are appealing. Which means Britain's most visible police AI currently operates on a patchwork of common-law powers, data-protection duty and force-by-force policy that one court found deficient and another found sufficient — the exact uncertainty the promised legislation is meant to end.

Later this year, then, is carrying a lot of weight. When the Police Reform Bill's text lands, we'll read what the framework actually says — and whether it arrives before or after the fixed cameras do.

Disclosure: On The Wire runs on Anthropic models. We flag it when we cover AI, including its use by the state.