The coalition, which is spearheaded by civil liberties and privacy campaigning group Big Brother Watch, and backed by the likes of former Brexit secretary David Davis, Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, and Green MP Caroline Lucas, warned against the “serious concerns” surrounding the deployment and use of the controversial technology.

Live and retroactive facial recognition technology is already being used for identification in policing and security settings within the UK and at varying stages.

While the coalition’s members stated that they hold differing views on certain aspects of live facial recognition surveillance, from its potential for discrimination to the sufficiency of its legal basis, they’ve unanimously agreed that police and private companies should “immediately stop using live facial recognition for public surveillance.”

The collective statement follows crime and policing minister, Chris Philip, announcing this week that the UK Government plans to use facial recognition technology to check camera footage against Britain’s passport database to identify the likes of shoplifters.

It also comes one month after the Defence and Security Accelerator, the Ministry of Defence’s body for finding and funding tech to be used by military, police, and security services, launched a “market exploration” of new facial recognition tech. It was commenced in part to identify “solutions” that could be deployed by the Home Office and police within the next 18 months.

While areas of UK Government look to expand its use of facial recognition tech, the European Parliament has recently endorsed a blanket ban on police using AI-powered facial recognition under its AI Act. Several U.S. cities, such as San Francisco and Boston, have banned governmental agencies’ use of facial recognition technology. Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, has called the UK an “outlier” in this regard.

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“This important call from MPs to urgently stop live facial recognition represents the greatest involvement parliamentarians have ever had in Britain’s approach to facial recognition surveillance,” said Carlo.

“With the Government now planning to turn all of our passport photos into mugshots for facial recognition scanning, yet again absent any democratic scrutiny, this intervention could not come at a more important time. This dangerously authoritarian technology has the potential to turn populations into walking ID cards in a constant police line up.

“The UK’s reckless approach to face surveillance makes us a total outlier in the democratic world, especially against the backdrop of the EU’s proposed ban.

“As hosts of the AI summit in autumn, the UK should show leadership in adopting new technologies in a rights-respecting way, rather than a way that mirrors the dystopian surveillance practices of Saudi Arabia and China.

“There must be an urgent stop to live facial recognition, parliamentary scrutiny and a much wider democratic debate before we introduce such a privacy-altering technology to British life.”

Recent research conducted by Big Brother Watch found that over 89% of UK police facial recognition alerts to date have wrongly identified members of the public as people of interest.