Check your own DB before asking for passport data • The Register
The Home Office has told police forces to check their own photo databases before asking it to search its libraries of passport and visa facial images, as well as avoiding urgent requests “unless it is absolutely necessary.”
In new guidance for its passport counter fraud officers and caseworkers in its Immigration Fingerprint Bureau, the Home Office details the hoops that law enforcement officers (LEOs) need to jump through to get an image checked against the huge facial databases used for UK passports and visas.
It follows privacy campaign groups Big Brother Watch and Privacy International issuing pre-action legal correspondence to the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, along with a call for a moratorium on police searches of the databases, in August.
Freedom of Information requests answered by 31 police forces found that law enforcement searches of the passport database rose from two in 2020 to 417 in 2023, while Home Office data showed that immigration data searches rose from 16 in 2023 to 102 in 2024.
The new Home Office guidance tells staff to check that a search requested by a LEO is “in the public interest” – defined as tackling serious crime, supporting national security or the protection of life – is likely to achieve its aims and to ensure “all other reasonable alternative avenues with lesser intrusion have been exhausted before requesting a facial image search.”
This includes searches of police image databases and, in the case of foreign nationals, the immigration database of fingerprints. If LEOs go ahead, the process falls some way short of automation. They have to get the approval of a police inspector or equivalent rank, fill out a form for each search of either the passport or visa database and send it to a secure official email address. They can mark requests as urgent but the guidance tells them to do so only as a last resort:
“LEOs need to be aware they must avoid making urgent requests, unless it is absolutely necessary as this could adversely affect processing of urgent requests,” it says.
If the search is approved and comes up with one or more matches, these “must be reviewed and confirmed by at least two members of Home Office staff” before the image and associated data – name, date of birth, nationality, sex and passport number for passports – can be passed on.
Even then, in an update to the guidance added a week after its initial publication on 15 September, the Home Office warns that such matches are based only on a comparison of images and “must not be relied upon as an expert opinion.”
The UK Passport Office’s store of photos and linked data is among the most comprehensive databases of the UK population with 53.2 million valid British passports in circulation at the end of 2024.
The Immigration and Asylum Biometric System includes facial images provided by foreign nationals when applying to UK Visas and Immigration, with Big Brother Watch saying this database contains around 92 million photographs. ®
