Every driver’s personal information to be made available to police

Every driver’s personal information is to be made available to police under Labour’s new crime laws.

The Crime and Policing Bill will give law enforcement the power to access some 50 million motorists’ data held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).

The DVLA data includes motorists’ names, addresses, date of birth, photographs, endorsements, convictions and relevant medical information that may affect their ability to drive.

At present, police can only access the data if they are investigating road traffic offences but the Home Office legislation will extend this to all offences to help the investigation of other crimes.

The move has raised concerns by privacy campaigners that it could allow police access to facial images, which could be cross-referenced through facial recognition with other databases.

They fear it resurrects a proposal under the Tories for police to be able to check thieves, burglars, shoplifters caught on camera retrospectively against all official databases.

Facial recognition database

Madeleine Stone, the senior advocacy officer at Big Brother Watch, said: “It’s disturbing to see the Government is reheating the Conservatives’ abandoned plans that most threaten privacy rights, including granting all police forces access to our driving licence photos, opening the door to the creation of a massive facial recognition database.

“The Bill allows the Government to grant police officers extraordinary powers to identify and track anyone with a driving licence, at the click of a button. Not only would this be an unprecedented breach of privacy, but would also put innocent citizens at risk of misidentifications and injustice.”

But the Home Office said the claims were “incorrect” and the Bill would have no impact on facial recognition.

A spokesman said the DVLA would not be allowed to share facial images with law enforcement.

The Home Office used the example of a vehicle and trailer at a port suspected of being part of a people smuggling operation as an instance of how the measures would help. Police or Border Force could quickly access DVLA records to help identify those involved.

The Bill does not spell out how drivers’ information would be used by law enforcement agencies. It simply states: “The Secretary of State may in accordance with this section make driver licensing information available for use by authorised persons for purposes relating to policing or law enforcement.”

Help solve more serious crimes

The conditions under which police and other law enforcement agencies access the information will be set out in regulations, yet to be published, according to the Bill.

It states they would specify the conditions that must be met before the information was made available, restrict the kind of information made available and purposes for which it might be used by police and law enforcement officers.

The clause is similar to the Tory proposal in their criminal justice Bill, which folded after running out of time before the election was called by Rishi Sunak last summer.

Chris Philp, the then policing minister, suggested extending police and law enforcement access to the DVLA database could help officers retrospectively use facial recognition to identify suspects in serious crimes such as rape and sex offences who may not already be on police databases.

He told MPs at the time that the Bill was creating a legislative framework for future regulations, the terms of which would have to be agreed by MPs.

Police use retrospective facial recognition to search their databases for matches but some forces including the Metropolitan Police have also deployed live facial recognition cameras that can identify suspects in a crowd by cross-referencing the images with a pre-approved watchlist.

In December, it highlighted how it had apprehended 540 suspects linked to crimes ranging from shoplifting to rape through the use of live facial recognition.

But it has faced controversy, with some deployments of the cameras being blocked after legal challenges over breach of privacy.

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