A LORDS committee has warned that police use of live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance is being expanded without clear legal grounds.

The Lords’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee sent a letter questioning the lawfulness of the technology to Home Secretary James Cleverly on Saturday. 

Police have been using LFR to scan the faces of everyone in range without consent and compare them with a database of people on a watch list. 

The committee said it was “deeply concerned that its use is being expanded without proper scrutiny and accountability.”

Peers said that there are “no rigorous standards or systems of regulation” and “no consistency” in police training.

Baroness Hamwee, chairwoman of the committee, said: “Does the use of LFR have a basis in law? Is it actually legal? It is essential that the public trusts LFR and how it is used.

“We question why there is such disparity between the approach in England and Wales and other democratic states in the regulation of LFR.”

In October, 65 MPs released a statement backed by groups such as Liberty and Amnesty International calling for an “immediate stop” to LFR use, citing human rights concerns and potential for discrimination.

Speaking to a science, innovation and technology committee in May, Dr Tony Mansfield, a principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory, said that facial recognition software used by the Metropolitan Police was prone to racial bias.

“We find that if the system is run at low thresholds and easy thresholds, that it does start showing a bias against the black males and females combined,” he told MPs.

Research by Big Brother Watch has found that over 89 per cent of police facial recognition alerts have wrongly identified members of the public as people of interest.