All because Plod no longer patrol on foot or pass intel onto manned CCTV departments.

There is no need for facial recognition in the general public space and I wonder whether this borders into the realms of RIPA or other targeted surveillance (which requires authorisation from Inspectors and above).

The real 'ut-oh' moment will be when 'they' release a story about a person being arrested for speech (in public) recorded by the CCTV/Monitoring systems.