The Ada Lovelace Institute has urged the Government to introduce new ‘risk-based legislation’ and an independent regulator to govern facial recognition and other biometric technologies.

The calls come after the publication of a report by the Institute which states that, despite the rapid expansion of biometric surveillance technologies in the UK in both the private and public sector, there is “no specific legal basis for their use, and the UK’s fragmented governance framework is failing in practice, creating legal uncertainty and undermining public trust”.

The report points to the “inadequate” and “fragmented patchwork of voluntary guidance, principles, standards and other frameworks” that are currently in place to govern the police use of live facial recognition. Worse still, the governance arrangements for the use of these technologies in non-police contexts are said to be “even less adequate, leaving their lawfulness in serious question”.

Against this backdrop, and as the UK is said to be “on the brink of mass rollouts of biometric technologies”, the Institute is calling for major change, particularly as the technologies are only going to get more sophisticated, leading to even greater concerns about their accuracy and legality.

The Institute urges the Government to develop a “comprehensive, legislatively backed biometrics governance framework” which would, among other things, have ‘tiered’ legal obligations depending on the risk level of the biometric system – analogous to the categorisation of different biometric systems in the EU AI Act – and include specific safeguards in law for biometric technologies that build on existing law and regulation.

Alongside this, the Institute recommends the establishment of an independent regulatory body to oversee and enforce this governance framework, to develop binding codes of practice for specific use cases, and to develop a separate code of practice outlining deployment criteria for police use of facial recognition technologies.

To read the report in full, click here.