Sadiq Khan and the Metropolitan Police are planning to install live facial recognition technology (“LFR”) on Oxford Street, Britain’s busiest shopping street. It will among the first areas in the country to have permanent LFR infrastructure scanning the faces of people passing and comparing them with a watchlist of wanted suspects.
In the following, Cam Wakefield describes a London Assembly meeting where Khan was questioned about his plans to install this dystopian surveillance technology without the public’s consent.
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Khan Approves Oxford Street Live Facial Recognition
By Cam Wakefield, as published by Reclaim the Net on 17 August 2026
“We’re a scrutiny body,” Susan Hall[1], a member of the London Assembly, reminded the chamber back in July.[2] “That means that we ask difficult questions of the Mayor to get him to answer questions.” She said it near the end. By then the Assembly had spent most of a morning holding London Mayor Sadiq Khan to account by agreeing with him, warmly.
The subject was live facial recognition (“LFR”), which is coming to Oxford Street when the street is pedestrianised. “I’ve asked the team to move at pace with plans to pedestrianize Oxford Street this summer,” Khan had said, “so we can deliver a vibrant, world-class, accessible destination.”
The cameras are expected to go on street infrastructure such as lampposts rather than the vans used until now. Permanent fixtures. One of the first permanent deployments in the country, on one of its busiest streets, reading every passing face against a watchlist.
The Met says each watchlist is built no more than 24 hours before a deployment and deleted immediately afterwards, and that when it piloted fixed cameras in Croydon, more than 470,000 people walked past for a single false alert. Facial recognition, it adds, is “one of the most revolutionary technology advances in policing in recent years,” and “around 80 per cent of Londoners support its use. That backing reflects a simple truth: it works.”
The sort of thing a scrutiny body might still have questions about.
Marina Ahmad went first. A Labour member, she opened by thanking the mayor for the patience he shows in putting up with “some of the nonsense that we hear in this chamber.” The nonsense being, as far as anyone could tell, the questions. Then she invited him to describe how well the rollout was going.
She had one strong card, and she played it straight. At Denmark Hill last year, she told the chamber that the technology picked up a man on the sex offenders register for child abuse at the station with a six-year-old child he could reach because he had befriended the mother. He was stopped because of LFR. It was the best argument made for the cameras all day, and it arrived gift-wrapped from the mayor’s own side.
Khan accepted the gift. Two hundred years of policing, he said, “from the advent of the fingerprint to the police car to CCTVs,” and now this, with over 2,000 arrests “leading to charge, prosecutions, convictions” by his own count. Then the line the morning existed for. “The Met Police are working really closely with the Oxford Street Development Corporation about how we, when we pedestrianise that street, how we use LFR in a sensible way. Using the opportunity of new CCTV to use LFR.” And, reassuringly, “What we don’t do is do a big bang, and it’d be a disaster.”
A sensible way. Good to know one exists.
Then the opposition rose, and here, surely, the difficult part would begin. Hall opened by reminding the Labour members what the room was for, and that handing him “easy, oh tell us how great you are today, Mr. Mayor” questions “isn’t actually what we’re here for.”
Her difficult question. “Do you approve of live facial recognition?”
He does. He is, he pointed out, “the only police commissioner who’s brought this in.”
“Good,” said Hall. Then, “Excellent. So we can find that we do agree on some things, Mr. Mayor.” She is, she said, “a massive supporter of live facial recognition,” and was “thrilled to bits” about its expansion. Her scrutiny consisted of asking whether it could also be pointed at protest marches, and at the Notting Hill Carnival, “where there’s quite a bit of crime going on.” Not whether the watching should happen. Whether her preferred crowds could go first.
An operational matter, said the mayor.
So, she tried drones. Would he approve of drones over “these dreadful hate marches in London or indeed the Notting Hill Carnival”? Part of an additional £4.5 million this year had gone on drones and e-bikes, he said, and “the technology is amazing.” Drones “can be easily deployed from the roofs of a couple of police stations.” Sometimes overtly. Sometimes covertly, “for reasons that are obvious.” An operational matter, again.
“Yep and I approve of all of those,” said Hall.
The objections did exist, but they were coming from outside the building. Ruth Ehrlich of Liberty said the prospect of permanent cameras on Oxford Street “marks a significant expansion of surveillance in public spaces,” and that “the Government has promised a legal framework for live facial recognition. The Met should not be rolling out more of this technology before that framework is in place.”
Jasleen Chaggar of Big Brother Watch also weighed in. “Innocent Londoners who are not suspected of any crime by the police should be able to wander around public spaces without identifying themselves to the authorities.” The mayor, she said, “should abandon the plans to roll out Orwellian biometric software which would instead place London in the company of authoritarian regimes.”
Neither of them has a seat in the chamber and, it seems that on the morning’s evidence, a seat would not have helped.
The hardest question the mayor faced all morning was whether he approved of a policy he had introduced himself.
The rollout is expected before the end of 2026.
Notes added by The Exposé:
[1] Susan Hall serves as the Leader of the Conservative Group on the London Assembly, a role she resumed in May 2025 after previously holding it from 2019 to 2023. The London Assembly itself is the scrutiny body of the Greater London Authority, responsible for checking the Mayor’s actions and investigating issues affecting Londoners.
[2] London Assembly (Mayor’s Question Time), 16 July 2026. Khan speaks about LFR beginning at timestamp 2:19:42. Hall speaks and asks Khan questions beginning at timestamp 2:25:30.
Featured image: Sadiq Khan at London Assembly Mayor’s Question Time on 16 July 2026.
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Double edge sword scenario…. pros & cons….
— People will feel safer with tight surveillance = Good;
— Thief, robber, pick-pocket-er will think twice to do crimes = Good;
— Citizens will obey the rules & laws = Good;
— Illegal Immigrants will be caught = Good;
— People will behave if knowing been watched = Good;
— China already run this technology = so far so good.
The bad sides, database of information could be turn against all of us….
— People perception of privacy no longer exist = Bad;
— Mandatory Digital ID database for facial recognition = Bad;
— Errr…! that’s all I could think of….
If the voting system applies, the majority of Pros outlines the cons, Right..?! Democracy wins! Opsie…I mean dystopian wins… Hooray..!!!
Anyway, we all ALREADY lived in DYSTOPIAN WORLD. Just that sometimes people pretend to have a denial syndrome & a chronic amnesia.
Just listen & trust your doctors (aka journalist), such as legit Dr Nancy Snyderman saying:
“Just get the damn flu vaccines, people (and booster, too)”
“Health benefit includes cancer, dementia, amnesia & quick death”
Khan’s statement that facial recognition “works”, is a lie. It doesn’t work in Cardiff where successful identification is less than 50%. That means it;s wrong more often than it’s right, leading to innocent individuals being identified as criminals. This is very dangerous technology.
Some people will become “Masters of Disguise” …. rubber noses, stick on eyebrows, mustaches & beards, various wigs, skin tone make-up, masks, ethnic clothing, shoes with six inch soles, etc. The technocracy will not be able to keep up with those, whether criminally inclined or ordinary citizens, whom do not want to be seen …. and the data centers will turn into ghost town warehouses or WEF-Nazi concentration camps.
I predict that people will avoid the areas where these cameras are installed…bad for businesses.
This is tyranny and the people should push it back. This data can be weaponised against anyone at any time. To say that it’s ok for you because you don’t do anything wrong is the same as saying that you are happy to not have freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. The government can redefine what you are allowed to do and weaponise your data against you. This is tyranny, not democracy.