Are Flock Cameras Tracking UK Drivers? What ANPR Actually Does

Are Flock cameras used by UK police?

There is no confirmed deployment of Flock Safety cameras by any UK police force. Flock is a US company, and its controversies are American. In the UK, the equivalent job is done by the national ANPR network run by the police.

It is easy to get confused here, so let me clear it up. Flock Safety is a US automatic number plate recognition company. The abuses tied to its name, tracking protesters, officers misusing it, cities cancelling contracts, all happened in the United States. There is an unrelated UK insurance company also called Flock, and a food business registered as FLOCK LONDON LTD, neither of which is Flock Safety. If you have seen Flock and the UK in the same sentence, it is almost certainly one of these mix-ups.

So what is actually reading UK number plates?

The UK national ANPR network, one of the largest vehicle-surveillance systems in the world. It is run by the police, not a private vendor.

According to the Home Office’s own impact assessment, the network runs more than 12,000 fixed camera sets plus around 1,900 mobile cameras, and submits over 100 million number plate reads to national systems every day. That scale dwarfs any single company’s footprint. The details are in the National ANPR Service data protection impact assessment ↗.

What does ANPR record, and for how long?

Each read captures your number plate, the time, and the location, usually with an image of the vehicle. The records are kept for up to a year on national systems.

• -What is stored: the plate, time, location, and in most cases an overview image of the vehicle plus a verification image
• -Local force systems: deleted no later than 90 days after the read
• -National systems: kept up to 12 months, longer if needed for an investigation

So a record of where your car was seen can sit in a national database for a year, whether or not you have done anything wrong.

The oversight gap

Critics point out that this huge database grew up without a specific law authorizing it, and oversight is fragmented.

The national ANPR database has been described, by the former Surveillance Camera Commissioner, as one of the largest data gatherers of citizens in the world, operating without a dedicated statutory framework. Campaign groups like Big Brother Watch have long argued the same. It is a real gap: a system this large runs largely on police policy rather than bespoke legislation.

What you can find out about your own car

You can make a subject access request to find out what ANPR data is held about your vehicle, using your rights under UK data protection law.

As the registered keeper, you can ask what reads are held on your plate. For the National ANPR Service you can email the Home Office, and you may need to prove your identity. If a request is refused, you can complain to the ICO. The route is set out on gov.uk ↗. There is no opt-out from ANPR itself; it reads every plate on covered roads. The face-scanning equivalent, live facial recognition, is covered in UK police facial recognition explained.