UK’s Crime and Policing Bill 2025, introduced in February and sponsored by the Home Office headed by Yvette Cooper, is progressing in the House of Commons, having reached the Committee stage.
The legislation, which is now two steps away from being sent to the House of Lords, aims to give law enforcement more powers in a number of areas, including greater access to driver’s license data.
This, in turn, is taken by critics, including civil rights groups, as clearing the path for law enforcement to start using more than 50 million driver’s license photos for facial recognition searches.
The Labour government has effectively reintroduced a provision contained in the Criminal Justice Bill pushed by the previous cabinet, which eventually had to abandon these plans due to strong criticism.
Big Brother Watch likens feeding tens of millions of driver’s license photos into the facial recognition machine to turning those photos “into mugshots,” while pooling this type of personal data into “a vast police database” – and all that, without proper privacy safeguards.
The group also recalls that the Conservative government’s attempt, which it says Labour is now “rehashing” via the new Policing Bill, sought to give law enforcement – police and the National Crime Agency (NCA) included – access to the photos in order to do facial recognition searches.
But what former Minister of State for Policing Chris Philp at the time called “anomalously (..) currently quite difficult” – now has a fair chance of succeeding.
The authorities’ overall justification for why the Crime and Policing Bill needs the proposed changes is to more effectively tackle “the epidemic of serious violence and violence against women and girls that stains our society,” and, “equip police with the powers they need to combat antisocial behavior, crime and terrorism” – with Clause 95 tucked in there, that happens to dramatically broaden biometric surveillance powers.
Namely, the clause specifies that it would be up to the Secretary of State for the Home Department (office currently held by Cooper) to issue a regulation that would then give police, NCA, and also the Independent Office for Police Conduct access to “driving license information” for policing or law enforcement purposes.
Big Brother Watch sees this as granting extraordinary powers that facilitate the identification and tracking of everyone with a driver’s license in the UK.
“Not only would this be an unprecedented breach of privacy, but would also put innocent citizens at risk of misidentifications and injustice,” the non-profit has warned.
