Policing minister Diana Johnson says government wants a suspect’s nationality and ethnicity released in most cases

New police guidance on releasing suspects’ ethnicity and migration status

In an interview this morning, the policing minister, Diana Johnson , said she had seen facial recognition technology in action in Croydon , London , where the Metropolitan police had put together a watchlist of wanted individuals, and the list was deleted after the exercise. “So it was very tailored,” Johnson told BBC Breakfast.

She added:

There are laws about how this has to be done in terms of human rights, equalities law, data protection laws.

I think one of the concerns people, perhaps rightly, have is the need to consolidate that into one piece of legislation or one law, and that’s something we’re going to consult on later in the year, about how live facial recognition technology should be used and the oversight of it to make it as transparent as possible for the public to really feel this is something that the police are using properly.

There is quite a lot of misinformation out there about what this actually does and how it’s used.

And I know in the past, there’ve been concerns about bias, particularly around certain ethnic groups or genders or age. And the way that this is now structured, the algorithms that are being used have been independently tested, so I’m confident that the live facial recognition that we’re rolling out today actually is within the law and does not have the bias that has happened previously.

Some would say this is yet another move towards a total surveillance society – challenges to privacy, challenges to freedom of assembly and association, and problems with race and sex discrimination because of the higher likelihood of false matches in the context of certain groups.

The decisions we have taken here in Scotland are helping support sustainable public finances.

Scotland’s public finances are better than many other parts of the UK, with the third highest revenue per person in the UK, behind only London and the south-east.

These figures underline the collective economic strength of the United Kingdom and how Scotland benefits from the redistribution of wealth inside the UK.

By sharing resources with each other across the UK, Scots benefit by £2,669 more per head in public spending than the UK average. It also means that devolved governments have the financial heft of the wider UK behind them when taking decisions.