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Big Brother Watch briefing on Clause 27 of the Criminal Justice Bill for the Joint Committee on Human Rights Big Brother Watch is deeply concerned by suggestions from the Policing Minister that Clause 27 of the Criminal Justice Bill will be used to create a vast police facial recognition database of driving licences. [...] Clause 27 Clause 27 replaces Clause 71 of the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act, allowing the Secretary of State to create regulations which grant police digital access to DVLA records for "purposes and circumstances as are related to policing or law enforcement". [...] However, Policing Minister Chris Philp stated during a committee session for the Bill that this was the intended use of Clause 27: “There is a power in clause [27] to allow police and law enforcement, including the NCA, to access driving licence records to do a facial recognition search, which, anomalously, is currently quite difficult.”3 At another Committee session, the Minister stated Clause 27. [...] The Scottish Biometrics Commissioner has expressed serious concerns about these plans: “The police in the UK [...] already have the technological means to view a person’s driving licence image when dealing with a road traffic matter [...] However, none of this can be done in the form of a routine bulk wash of the images of innocent citizens against images derived from the scene of a minor crime. [...] Doing so in my view would place citizens in a permanent police ‘digital lineup’ and would be a disproportionate breach of privacy.”7 The precedent of police accessing a non-police state database to search millions of innocent people’s biometric data for everyday policing purposes would be deeply concerning engagement of the A8 right to privacy.