Mr. Andrew O'Sullivan:

It is important that it is accurate and reliable. Our statement stands, and that is certainly what the director of NIST will say. It is accepted by other governments and other police forces that this is the correct accuracy of those figures.

It is also important to understand that, as the Commissioner said, we do use biometric identification. We do not use it for the purposes of comparing against a reference database but we do use it to sift and cluster large numbers of images. There has never been a single case, among the hundreds of cases that have gone through the courts, of us getting that wrong based on the use of biometric technology.

The statement that it is only 70% or 80% accurate is based on older algorithms from three or four years ago. The current and latest technology that we intend to procure has a much higher accuracy rate. The other point to be clear about is that we do not have any intention of doing autonomous machine decision-making and have explicitly said so. Every single decision is made by a human. The technology is just there to provide a set of options, to sift and to break down the images into something manageable.