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Crime and Policing Bill

My Lords, I was hesitant as to whether to speak here, but some years ago I had very close acquaintance with facial recognition software, so I thought it might be useful to say a couple of things.

First, I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, that this is an extremely good technology. I will get to the concerns expressed about it in a minute. This software has been used to apprehend murderers. For example, I think the Australian outback murderer was apprehended because of it and a far-right group of extremists in Sweden was identified by some

very clever use of this facial recognition technology. It can be used successfully in preventing crime. Now, that is not all live use of the technology, and these amendments are about live use of the technology.

I very much respect the work of the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger. I am a great supporter of Big Brother Watch, and he and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, make good points. Much is made of the disparity in accuracy between white and black faces. The software I was involved with had that problem. The reason for that is that it was trained on white faces—they were afraid of being thought of as racist if they focused on black faces. Therefore, the accuracy for black faces was much worse, they discovered, and so they quickly started training the software on black faces and the disparity closed right up. As far as I know, the disparity, if it still exists, is quite small, but others may know better than me. This was several years ago, but that definitely happened with this set of facial recognition software.

1.45 pm

There is the issue of perfectly innocent people being stopped and searched. That happened to me several times when I was in my teens and twenties. I had rather long hair and looked a bit—