No lawful retention and deletion regime for the 19 million custody images feeding facial recognition

A 2012 High Court ruling (RMC v Met) found indefinite retention of custody images of unconvicted people unlawful, yet the Police National Database still holds around 19 million facial images, including hundreds of thousands of people never charged; the former Biometrics Commissioner estimated 'several million' are unlawfully held. Inspections found 11 of 17 forces do not proactively review or delete images, and ageing systems cannot bulk-delete. Unlike DNA and fingerprints (automatic deletion under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012), facial images have no statutory regime, and this unlawful stockpile is the search corpus for expanding retrospective facial recognition.

National facial recognition rollout is being built on top of a database a court declared unlawful fourteen years ago. Innocent people are searchable by face indefinitely, and each year of inaction hardens the precedent that judicial rulings against surveillance practice can simply be ignored.

Extend the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 automatic-deletion regime to custody images, funded replacement or remediation of PND systems with deletion-by-design, and mandatory published weeding metrics per force. A concrete legislative clause plus a bounded IT programme, an obvious candidate for inclusion in the forthcoming biometrics bill.

// State-led: Instrument: legislative clause extending PoFA 2012 automatic deletion to custody images, plus funded PND system remediation.

Courts declared indefinite retention unlawful fourteen years ago, yet millions of innocent people's images remain the search corpus for expanding facial recognition; the deletion clause awaits an unintroduced bill.