Live Facial Recognition Resources - 2023 to 2025
Publication Number: 1574
FOI Number: 21708
Information Request – which has been numbered to assist with the disclosure
- How much has the force spent on procuring live facial recognition equipment over the past five years?
- What type of equipment does this include (i.e. vehicles, computing equipment, software licences etc)?
- How many police staff have been involved in the deployment of live facial recognition in the past 12 months?
- How much has been spent by Essex Police on deploying the use of live facial recognition in the past 12 months (including police staff time)
- How many times has live facial recognition been deployed in or around Southend on Sea (as defined by the LA boundary) in the past 12 months?
- How many arrests can be directly attributed to the use of live facial recognition in the past 12 months? Across the Southend on Sea area and Essex as a whole?
- How many total arrests have been made by Essex police in the LA area of Southend on Sea in the past 12 months?
- What is the total average cost to the force of employing a police constable on point 4 of the police constables pay scales (wages plus on costs)?
- Please can you also confirm whether the force has ever used live facial recognition technology for covert surveillance? (I am not seeking any operational details as to where or when this may have taken place but rather whether it ever has)
FOI Duty
First Duty – Essex Police holds some of the information relating to your request
Second Duty – See below
Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request
Exemption - Section 12(1)
Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA
Reasoning – Essex Police are unable to provide a comprehensive data report to meet this request as the data is not available in a readily extractable format, nor is it held on a central log.
With regard to Question 4, Essex Police is unable to report the specific total expenditure on Live Facial Recognition (LFR) deployments over the previous 12 months as this is not readily extractable information from our financial records. Each deployment is separate and may or may not involve additional overtime payments to officers participating in those deployments. Those officers participating in a deployment as part of their normal duties are not separately costed. To attempt to answer this question would require a manual review of the attendance of each deployment to ascertain if any costs were incurred that were specific to that deployment, extracting any relevant information found and collating it into a bespoke report.
To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would additionally qualify as the creation of data as the results cannot be processed by means of purely sorting or filtering data sources or running a database query tool. There is no requirement under the act to create data purely to answer FOI requests.
When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2)), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following
Essex Police can however address some of your questions below:
Caveat: The information is correct as at 12 May 2025
Q1. How much has the force spent on procuring live facial recognition equipment over the past five years?
A. £598,200. This includes the costs of both the software contract and the associated physical equipment.
Q2. What type of equipment does this include (i.e. vehicles, computing equipment, software licences etc)?
A. Essex Police has two fully functional CCTV vans. Associated equipment includes laptops, monitors, mobile and fixed cameras on each van, LFR software via the company Digital Barriers and licenses.
Q3. How many police staff have been involved in the deployment of live facial recognition in the past 12 months?
A. Approximately eight members of staff per deployment. So far there have been 51 deployments.
Q5. How many times has live facial recognition been deployed in or around Southend on Sea (as defined by the LA boundary) in the past 12 months?
A. The dates and locations of previous deployments are provided on our website:
Live facial recognition | Essex Police
Q6. How many arrests can be directly attributed to the use of live facial recognition in the past 12 months? Across the Southend on Sea area and Essex as a whole?
A. The numbers of arrests that occurred at each previous deployment can be found on the webpage linked to above.
Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.
Recorded crime data by area is available via the monthly Essex Police performance reports published by the Essex PFCC and via the ‘Crime Map’ facility on our website:
Police Performance - Essex PFCC
Southend Central | Southend-on-Sea | Essex Police | Essex Police
The following articles on our website regarding the use of LFR may also be of interest:
Harlow: Live Facial Recognition and OpenGate deployed in town centre | Essex Police
Clacton: First Live Facial Recognition deployment at Airshow | Essex Police