The Home Office opened a consultation on 7 July on new rules governing police access to driving licence records.
Under the proposals, police could automatically obtain photographs, addresses and other information held by the DVLA for purposes extending well beyond road traffic offences. The government says explicitly that this is not a proposal to allow police to search the driving licence database using facial recognition.
That is clearer than the position ministers set out when the legislation was passing through Parliament. It still leaves an odd gap.
Neither the Crime and Policing Act 2026 nor the draft regulations published alongside the consultation contain an express prohibition on using DVLA images for facial recognition searches. The government's restriction appears instead in its explanation of what the present policy is intended to do.
A previous government introduced a similar access reform for a very different stated reason.
In December 2023, Conservative policing minister Chris Philp questioned senior policing figures about a clause in the Criminal Justice Bill. He described its purpose directly: police and the National Crime Agency would be able to access driving licence records to conduct a facial recognition search when, for example, CCTV had captured the face of an unidentified suspect. Philp told the committee the change would make the DVLA database searchable by police "including for facial recognition purposes". National Crime Agency director general Graeme Biggar supported the proposal.
Philp subsequently qualified what the legislation would actually achieve.
In a letter to Joanna Cherry MP, chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, dated 19 March 2024, Philp said police could not then run facial recognition searches against the DVLA image gallery because, he said, there was no DVLA capability to enable it. He said there would be significant technical issues, a policy and operational assessment, and work to determine whether further legislation or consultation was required. He also said any move beyond using the image to check whether somebody was entitled to drive a vehicle would be "a matter for proper debate at the time".
The Criminal Justice Bill fell when the 2024 general election was called.
Labour returned to the same underlying problem in its Crime and Policing Bill, introduced in February 2025. The provision expanded the purposes for which police and other authorised bodies could obtain DVLA information automatically rather than having to make manual requests outside road traffic cases.
When Computer Weekly asked whether the provision could be used to connect the DVLA database to facial recognition systems, the Home Office gave an unequivocal answer.
It said the suggestion was "categorically untrue" and that the provisions would have "no impact on facial recognition".
Police evidence at the time showed why the question had arisen.
In written evidence to the Home Affairs Committee's inquiry into the summer 2024 disorder, published 16 January 2025, the National Police Chiefs' Council said that, as at 13 November 2024, retrospective facial recognition had helped identify 127 suspects, while a further 340 suspects seen in footage had not been identified. Police had used reference images from police custody records, HM Passport Office, immigration records and Interpol.
The NPCC then said police lacked access to the DVLA database and that such access "would have helped during this investigation". It said access in a future national investigation would substantially improve offender identification.
That evidence does not prove that the Labour government's DVLA provision was designed to enable facial recognition. It does show that senior policing bodies had already identified the DVLA database as potentially useful in the same section of their evidence dealing with retrospective facial recognition.
Peers tried to put the dividing line into the legislation itself.
In March, Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Doocey moved an amendment stating that authorised users could not use DVLA information "for the purposes of biometric searches using facial recognition technology".
Home Office minister Lord Hanson rejected it. He told the Lords that police do not conduct facial matching against images contained on the DVLA database and that the clause would not change that, and said the provision was intended to broaden ordinary police access to driving licence information rather than establish mass surveillance.
The amendment was defeated by 123 votes to 40.
One criticism made during the passage of the Bill has since been addressed.
Earlier versions would have left much of the detail to regulations receiving relatively limited parliamentary scrutiny. The government changed that on Report after criticism from the Lords Constitution Committee and the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. Regulations governing access to DVLA data must now be approved by both the Commons and the Lords before they can be made.
The Act received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026 and the DVLA provisions came fully into force on 29 June, under a commencement order bringing section 181 into effect.
A saving provision keeps the old 2001 regulations in force until their replacement is made. Those existing rules largely restrict automatic police access to road traffic purposes. Other police uses continue to depend mainly on manual requests made case by case.
The government is now consulting on how far the replacement rules should go.
Its options range from retaining the existing road traffic restriction to allowing automatic access for serious crime and national security, all criminal offences, or the full range of policing activities including safeguarding and locating missing people.
Photographs are included.
The consultation says more sensitive information such as a driver's photograph and signature can have operational value when police need to confirm identity, prevent impersonation or find a vulnerable person. It proposes higher safeguards around access to those fields, including operational justification, permissions based on role, training and auditing.
The Home Office then draws a specific boundary.
It says the consultation concerns police accessing driving data, rather than the DVLA database being searched to identify an unknown person. Elsewhere it states that the exercise is not intended to create new capabilities for data matching on a large scale, profiling or biometric searches and is separate from government policy on facial recognition.
The proposed code of practice makes the same system look largely like individual record checking. It repeatedly requires access to be necessary and proportionate, requires a record of the person whose information was obtained and says every use should be logged and auditable.
The draft regulations would require users to be trained and vetted and would require organisations to record who accessed information, whose record was obtained, the operational reason and whether access was through a database search or a direct application to the DVLA.
What they do not contain is the sentence Doocey tried to add to the Act: an express prohibition on facial recognition searches.
The Act defines driver licensing information broadly as information held for driver licensing purposes. Its explanatory notes confirm that this includes a person's photograph and signature as well as their name, address, date of birth, driving entitlement, endorsements and certain other information.
That does not mean police can currently feed an unknown face into the DVLA database and search millions of licence photographs for a match. The Home Office says they cannot, the technology is not currently used that way, and the consultation published on 7 July expressly says that is not what these proposals are designed to enable.
It does mean the statutory text itself does not settle the question by excluding facial recognition.
That has become more significant because the government accepts that the wider law governing police facial recognition needs rewriting. Its separate consultation, which closed in February, said existing police powers rest on a complicated combination of common law, data protection, human rights legislation and police policy. Ministers are developing a new legal framework specifically for facial recognition and related technologies.
The government therefore has a defensible explanation for rejecting a prohibition covering only the DVLA: it wants facial recognition rules decided through the wider biometric framework rather than one database at a time.
There is also a documented reason Parliament asked for the restriction.
A Conservative policing minister originally promoted expanded DVLA access by talking openly about searching driving licence photographs with facial recognition. Police chiefs later told Parliament that access to the DVLA database would have helped an investigation in which retrospective facial recognition had left hundreds of suspects unidentified.
The Labour government says that is not what its new system is for.
The regulations that will decide how police actually use the expanded power are still in draft. Before they can take effect, both Houses of Parliament will have to vote on them.