We Asked Nine Specific Questions. We Got a General Assurance.

A week after writing to our MP, Alex Mayer, we received a substantive reply.

Our original letter had been lengthy, but the questions were specific.

We had asked why live facial recognition was being expanded before Parliament had approved a dedicated statutory framework.

We asked whether further expansion should be paused until that framework was in place.

We asked how future legislation would regulate the linking of facial-recognition data with other policing datasets, the use of AI to infer movements or associations, secondary use of biometric information, retention and deletion requirements, independent technical auditing, and publication of biometric-data incidents.

We also asked for her view on the use of facial recognition by private companies in ordinary public-facing environments.

The reply acknowledged that facial recognition is powerful and that there are legitimate concerns about privacy, bias and proportionality.

It said safeguards must be in place.

It said privacy and freedom of expression were important.

It said a robust legal framework was needed.

And it said the Government was right to seek views on the technology.

Those are all reasonable statements.

But they did not answer most of the questions we had actually asked.

There was no answer on whether expansion should be paused pending legislation.

No answer on how different surveillance datasets should be linked.

No answer on AI-assisted inference.

No answer on secondary use.

No answer on whether deletion should be independently verifiable.

No answer on publishing retention or deletion failures.

And no substantive view on private-sector facial recognition.

The reply concluded by saying the points we had raised would be brought to ministerial teams “wherever it is appropriate to do so”.

That was not the level of scrutiny we had been looking for.

Our concern was never simply whether safeguards should exist.

Everyone appeared to agree that they should.

The question was whether those safeguards were sufficiently clear, measurable and independently verifiable.

And buried inside our original letter was already the idea that would become the foundation of this project:

If the public is told biometric information is deleted, audited and protected, it should be possible to demonstrate that without compromising legitimate policing activity.

By this point, Bedfordshire Police already had our first detailed FOI request.

Four days earlier we had asked our MP for political scrutiny.

Now we were beginning to realise that the more useful route might be to test the safeguards ourselves.

Policy says deletion happens.

We decided to ask for the evidence.