Facial recognition technology could be used more often by UK police forces, according to new plans announced by the Home Office. Policing and crime minister Sarah Jones said a widespread rollout of the equipment could mark the biggest breakthrough in catching criminals since DNA matching. People are being asked for their views on its use, as part of a 10-week consultation launched on Thursday, possibly paving the way for new laws. Jones credited the technology for helping to arrest thousands of criminals, but campaign group Big Brother Watch said increased use would make George Orwell roll in his grave. Facial recognition is used to locate wanted suspects and find vulnerable people.

The Metropolitan police commissioner has hit back at demands to drop the use of live facial recognition cameras at this weekend's Notting Hill carnival over concerns of racial bias and an impending legal challenge. Mark Rowley wrote in a letter that the instant face-matching technology would be used at Europe's biggest street carnival "in a non-discriminatory way" using an algorithm that "does not perform in a way which exhibits bias". He was responding to a letter from 11 anti-racist and civil liberty organisations, disclosed in the Guardian, that urged the Met to scrap the use of the technology at an event that celebrates the African-Caribbean community. The Runnymede Trust, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Race on the Agenda, and Human Rights Watch were among those who claimed in the letter to Rowley on Saturday that the technology "will only exacerbate concerns about abuses of state power and racial discrimination within your force". Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to "self-regulate" their use of the technology because of the lack of a legal framework and deploy the technology's algorithm at lower settings that are biased against ethnic minorities and women.

Experts have warned of a'frightening expansion' of'Orwellian' technology as the government expands the use of live facial recognition across the country. Ten vans equipped with facial recognition cameras will be deployed across seven police forces – Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire. The Home Office maintains that this technology will only be used to catch'high–harm' offenders with rules to ensure'safeguards and oversight'. According to the government, the technology has already been used to make 580 arrests in London over the last year, including 52 registered sex offenders. However, rights groups have raised concerns that the unprecedented rollout of this surveillance technology risks becoming overly intrusive.

Big Brother Watch is bringing a legal challenge against the Met Police's use of the technology, alongside Shaun Thompson, who was wrongly identified by an LFR camera. Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch, said: "Police have interpreted the absence of any legislative basis authorising the use of this intrusive technology as carte blanche to continue to roll it out unfettered, despite the fact that a crucial judicial review on the matter is pending. "The Home Office must scrap its plans to roll out further live facial recognition capacity until robust legislative safeguards are established." Charlie Whelton, policy and campaigns officer at Liberty, said: "It's welcome news that the government will finally develop a statutory framework on the use of facial recognition, but this should be in place before more facial recognition technology is rolled out. "There's no reasonable excuse to be putting even more cameras on our streets before the public have had their say and legislation is brought in to protect all of us." The government says officers using the LFR vans will need to follow the College of Policing's guidance on the technology and the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice.

In one email from Facewatch seen by the BBC, the firm told Ms Horan it "relies on information submitted by stores" and the Home Bargains branches involved had since been "suspended from using the Facewatch system". Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said they had been contacted by more than 35 people who have complained of being wrongly placed on facial recognition watchlists. "They're being wrongly flagged as criminals," Ms Stone said. "They've given no due process, kicked out of stores. This is having a really serious impact."

The future is coming at Croydon fast. It might not look like Britain's cutting edge but North End, a pedestrianised high street lined with the usual mix of pawn shops, fast-food outlets and branded clothing stores, is expected to be one of two roads to host the UK's first fixed facial recognition cameras. Digital photographs of passersby will be silently taken and processed to extract the measurements of facial features, known as biometric data. They will be immediately compared by artificial intelligence to images on a watchlist. Alerts can lead to arrests.

Civil liberties campaigners have said that a proposal made by Keir Starmer on Thursday to expand the use of live facial recognition technology would amount to the effective introduction of a national ID card system based on people's faces. Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said it was ironic the new prime minister was suggesting a greater use of facial matching on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force. "Expanding live facial recognition means millions of innocent Britons being subjected to automated ID checks," said Carlo. "These are the surveillance tactics of China and Russia and Starmer seems ignorant of the civil liberties implications." Live facial recognition has, until now, largely been used in the UK by the Metropolitan police and South Wales police, as a real-time aid to help officers to detect and prevent crime, including at public events such as last year's coronation.

The recently-departed watchdog in charge of monitoring facial recognition technology has joined the private firm he controversially approved, paving the way for the mass roll-out of biometric surveillance cameras in high streets across the country. In a move critics have dubbed an "outrageous conflict of interest", Professor Fraser Sampson, former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, has joined Facewatch as a non-executive director. Sampson left his watchdog role on 31 October, with Companies House records showing he was registered as a company director at Facewatch the following day, 1 November. Campaigners claim this might mean he was negotiating his Facewatch contract while in post, and have urged the advisory committee on business appointments to investigate if it may have "compromised his work in public office". It is understood that the committee is currently considering the issue.

Some of Britain's biggest retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis and Sainsbury's, have been urged to pull out of a new policing strategy amid warnings it risks wrongly criminalising people of colour, women and LGBTQ people. A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers – also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark – saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will "amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system". The letter, from Liberty, Amnesty International and Big Brother Watch, among others, questions the unchecked rollout of a technology that has provoked fierce criticism over its impact on privacy and human rights at a time when the European Union is seeking to ban the technology in public spaces through proposed legislation. "Facial recognition technology notoriously misidentifies people of colour, women and LGBTQ people, meaning that already marginalised groups are more likely to be subject to an invasive stop by police, or at increased risk of physical surveillance, monitoring and harassment by workers in your stores," the letter states.Its authors also express dismay that the move will "reverse steps" that big retailers introduced during the Black Lives Matter movement, including high-profile commitments to be champions of diversity, equality and inclusion. Meanwhile, concerns over the broadening use of facial recognition technology have further intensified after the emergence of details of a police watchlist used to justify the contentious decision to use biometric surveillance at July's Formula One British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

Dozens of cross-party MPs and peers have joined a campaign for an "immediate stop" to the use of live facial recognition surveillance by police and private companies. The former cabinet minister David Davis, the Liberal Democrats leader, Sir Ed Davey, the Green MP Caroline Lucas and the former shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti are among 65 members of the House of Commons and House of Lords to call for a halt to the technology's use. The campaign is spearheaded by the privacy advocate Big Brother Watch and is also backed by 31 groups including Liberty, Amnesty International and the Race Equality Foundation. Police have deployed live facial recognition at large-scale public events, including King Charles's coronation. The statement said: "We hold differing views about live facial recognition surveillance, ranging from serious concerns about its incompatibility with human rights, to the potential for discriminatory impact, the lack of safeguards, the lack of an evidence base, an unproven case of necessity or proportionality, the lack of a sufficient legal basis, the lack of parliamentary consideration, and the lack of a democratic mandate. "We call on UK police and private companies to immediately stop using live facial recognition for public surveillance." The statement comes after the policing minister, Chris Philp, announced government plans to make UK passport photos searchable by police. Philp said he planned to integrate data from the police national database (PND), the Passport Office and other national databases to help police find a match with the "click of one button". Civil liberty campaigners said the plans would be an "Orwellian nightmare" that amounted to a "gross violation of British privacy principles". Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, last month predicted that facial recognition technology would transform criminal investigations as much as DNA testing had done. The director of Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, said: "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.