Oxford Street is getting permanent face-scanning cameras in time for Christmas

About half a million people walk down Oxford Street on a typical day. From December, a lot of them will have their faces checked against a police watchlist on the way past the shops.

The Metropolitan Police plans to install permanent live facial recognition cameras on the London shopping street in time for the pre-Christmas rush, the Evening Standard reported on Friday. The cameras will probably go on lampposts or other street furniture. They scan the faces of passers-by and compare them against a list of wanted suspects. If it goes ahead, Oxford Street will be among the first places in the UK with fixed LFR hardware, as opposed to the camera vans police have been parking on pavements for years.

And it won't stop at one street. The Met also wants static cameras elsewhere in the West End and in Soho, which the Standard says have some of the highest crime rates in London. A Met spokesperson said "conversations remain ongoing with our partners on where we will place the cameras."

The Croydon numbers

The Met's case rests on a six-month pilot in Croydon, south London. The force says static cameras there contributed to a 10% drop in crime and led to 173 arrests, which it describes as "one every 35 minutes."

Do the arithmetic and something strange falls out. Six months is roughly 4,300 hours. 173 arrests at one every 35 minutes comes to about 100 hours. Both figures can only be true if the cameras were switched on for a small slice of the pilot. That fits the Met's other promise: static systems "are only turned on when officers are present on the ground," and signs tell the public when a deployment is running.

So these are permanent cameras that are off most of the time. For now. The hardware stays on the lamppost either way, and switching it on more often only takes a policy decision.

Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has called LFR "one of the most revolutionary technology advances in policing in recent years." The force has arrested more than 2,000 people using facial recognition since the start of 2024, and it has started using the technology at Tube stations. The spokesperson's version was simpler: "Live, facial recognition is an important tool which is helping us keep London safe."

The law that isn't there yet

Liberty, the human rights group, keeps pointing at the same gap. The government launched a public consultation in December 2025 on a legal framework for police use of biometrics and facial recognition. It closed in February. The Home Office still hasn't published its response, and says it will come later this parliamentary session. Until then, the rules for scanning half a million faces a day are whatever the Met decides they are.

Akiko Hart, Liberty's director, told the Press Association the plan "will mean thousands of Christmas shoppers will have their faces scanned by this unregulated surveillance technology." She said "this significant rollout should be paused," and added that "this lack of transparency damages public trust."

Hart's other complaint, as the Standard reported it, was that shoppers would be scanned "without being given a choice." That is the bit that changes with permanent cameras. A police van parked outside a station is an event. You can see it, read the sign, and walk the long way round if you want to. A camera on a lamppost on the main shopping street in the capital is part of the street. There is no long way round Oxford Street in December. If you want to buy a coat in the West End, your face goes through the system whether or not anyone on the watchlist is anywhere near.

The Met would answer that the system only checks faces against a list of wanted people, and that the cameras only run when officers are there. Fine. But those are operating choices, made by the force, under rules the government hasn't finished writing. None of them is written into law.

The politics are mostly running the other way. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the Police Federation's annual conference on Thursday that her party would expand live facial recognition, saying it would replace officers "spending hours and hours crawling through CCTV." The Home Office, which still owes everyone an answer on its own consultation, hasn't stopped the Met from going ahead.

There's a precedent problem as well. Once one street has cameras on the lampposts, the next request is easier to make. The Met has already named Soho and the wider West End. Croydon was the pilot. Oxford Street is the showroom.

Redesigned for pedestrians

A stretch of Oxford Street is due to be pedestrianised next week, and the plan is for the whole street to go traffic-free eventually. Fewer cars, more people on foot, and cameras on the lampposts checking the faces of everyone who passes. London is redesigning its best-known shopping street around pedestrians and wiring it to identify them in the same winter.

Sources: Evening Standard (via AOL): Festive shoppers to be scanned as Oxford Street gets facial recognition cameras, dpa (via Daily Sabah): London shoppers face facial scans as Oxford Street gets new cameras.