Met Police to roll out permanent static facial recognition cameras across London's West End

The rollout follows a six-month pilot of static infrastructure-mounted cameras in Croydon and follows a High Court ruling in April that confirmed the Met's LFR policy is compatible with human rights law, although that judgment is subject to a planned appeal.

In a significant shift from mobile van-based deployments to semi-permanent fixed infrastructure, the Met will install static LFR cameras at multiple locations across the West End and Soho, targeting what it describes as crime hotspots in some of London's busiest areas. The cameras will be mounted on existing street furniture rather than dedicated vans, replicating the approach trialled in Croydon. While the Metropolitan Police's press release described them as "not permanent in any one location," the intent is for a sustained and geographically broad infrastructure capable of being repositioned as crime patterns shift.

From 2027, the Met plans to work with local councils to identify additional high-crime areas across London and accelerate further deployment. No cap on the eventual number of locations has been specified. The rollout is intended to develop into a city-wide infrastructure programme rather than a series of time-limited operations. The Met said that funding discussions with business improvement districts - including New West End Company, which is investing £23 million in West End security over the next five years - are already under way.

The Met's case for expansion rests on data from the Croydon pilot, which ran from October 2025 to March 2026 across 24 separate operations. The force reports 173 arrests during the pilot period, of which 61 per cent related to offences committed within the Croydon area itself. The Met states that more than 470,000 people passed through the camera field during this period and that there was one false alert, which resulted in a brief interaction with officers and no arrest.

The Met has made over 2,000 arrests using LFR since the start of 2024. It claims arrests of registered sex offenders, including one case study where a man was found with a child in breach of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order, and prolific offenders wanted for serious violence.

The expansion comes two months after the High Court dismissed a judicial review challenging the lawfulness of the Met's LFR policy in R (Thompson and Carlo) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2026] EWHC 915 (Admin), decided by Lord Justice Holgate and Mrs Justice Farbey on 21 April 2026.

The claimants - Shaun Thompson, a youth worker who was falsely identified and threatened with arrest by LFR in 2024, and Silkie Carlo, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch - argued that the Met's September 2024 policy left too much discretion to individual officers as to where and against whom the technology was deployed, and that this violated Articles 8, 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened.

The court dismissed both grounds. It concluded that the policy's "Use Cases", which define the purposes for which LFR may be deployed, together with its watchlist criteria, authorisation procedures, and oversight requirements, provided sufficient legal constraints to prevent arbitrary use. The court found that the level of interference with Article 8 rights was not disproportionate given the safeguards in place, and that neither claimant's Convention rights had been breached.

The court's reasoning focused on the 2024 policy governing overt, operation-specific deployments. The claimants had argued that plans to mount permanent or semi-permanent installations would make it "impossible" for Londoners to move freely without biometric capture. The court acknowledged but did not definitively resolve that question, since the challenge concerned the existing policy rather than a future static deployment framework.

Big Brother Watch has confirmed it will seek to appeal the ruling and is crowdfunding for the purpose. The planned appeal, if it proceeds, will examine whether the policy provides sufficient "foreseeability" - the legal requirement that individuals can anticipate when and how biometric surveillance will be used - in the context of an expanding and increasingly infrastructure-embedded deployment model. 

The data protection implications of the static deployment model differ in material respects from van-based operations. Under the existing operational model, each LFR deployment uses a bespoke, intelligence-led watchlist created no more than 24 hours in advance and deleted immediately afterwards. The cameras are activated only during specific deployments when officers are present on the ground. Biometric templates of individuals who do not trigger an alert are immediately and automatically deleted.

The static infrastructure model replicates these operational characteristics and the Met says that cameras are only activated during deployments and that watchlists are still created and deleted per-operation. Each deployment watchlist is described as "intelligence-led" and created within 24 hours of the operation. The existing policy was adopted in September 2024 following a review of earlier iterations and was the subject of the judicial review. Whether the West End static rollout requires a revised or supplementary policy and whether that would require fresh ICO engagement was not addressed in the announcement. The ICO has previously engaged with the Met on LFR deployments and published guidance on biometric data in public spaces but its position on the static infrastructure model has not been publicly stated.

Support for the expansion comes from Westminster City Council, New West End Company, and Heart of London Business Alliance, all of which have backed the use of LFR for crime reduction in the capital's retail and hospitality district. Westminster City Council's cabinet member for enforcement, Cllr Caroline Sargent, described the Council as "embracing both AI and new technologies."

"Live Facial Recognition for crime prevention is a project led by the Metropolitan police. However, we are open to working with them to help deliver - whether that is through shared assets, permissions or talking to other organisations." she said.

"AI is advancing at pace, and to ensure our cameras remain proactive and targeted on the issues we will look at AI options that help us anticipate/flag activities that are suspicious and to improve our evidence capture and speed of response."

The Met's LFR programme is the largest of its kind in the UK and is being watched closely by other police forces. The Home Office has separately announced plans to increase the number of LFR-equipped vans nationally from 10 to 50 across England and Wales, making all forces eligible to deploy the technology. There is no primary legislation specifically governing police use of LFR and its use is governed by a combination of common law powers, the Human Rights Act 1998, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, the DPA 2018, and force-level policy.

Derek Bedlow

This article first appeared on Local Government Lawyer's new site for public sector information governance professionals, www.info-gov.uk.