Note
Read the responsibility note on the section index before using anything here.
There is no confirmed deployment of Flock Safety cameras by any UK police force. Searches for the term have risen because American reporting travels, and the confusion is made worse by an unrelated British insurance company that is also called Flock. If someone tells you Flock cameras have appeared on a British street, ask which force confirmed it.
What the UK does have is its own automatic number plate recognition network, run directly by the police rather than bought from a vendor, and larger than the American system by most measures.
The scale
Figures come from official sources and differ depending on date and what is being counted, so both are worth citing.
In October 2023 the then Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner wrote to the Secretary of State for Transport describing ANPR as the largest non-military database in the UK, covering approximately 15,400 traffic lanes and receiving between 75 and 80 million number plate reads per day, with a trajectory towards 100 million. More recent reporting citing the Home Office's own impact assessment puts the network at more than 12,000 fixed camera sets and around 1,900 mobile cameras, submitting over 100 million reads daily.
Each read captures the plate, the time, the location, and usually an image of the vehicle. There is no way to opt out on a public road, and the network operates under police impact assessments rather than anything resembling individual consent.
How this differs from the American problem
The practical differences matter more than the similarities.
There is no vendor. The system is police-run and national, so there is no company selling transparency features and no equivalent of Flock's per-search audit export that you can request by name. The American research strategy of obtaining a search log and reading who queried what does not have a direct British counterpart.
There is no patchwork of local policies to compare. That removes some of the leverage available in the United States, where an agency can be shown to be breaking its own published rules or its state's statute.
The oversight, such as it is, is national. The Surveillance Camera Code of Practice, issued under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, is the main statutory instrument that directly governs these camera systems, and police forces, police and crime commissioners, local authorities in England and Wales, and the National Crime Agency must have regard to its principles. The Information Commissioner's Office handles data protection, and its video surveillance guidance explicitly covers ANPR.
That framework has been unstable and is worth checking before you rely on it. The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill would have abolished both the Code and the Commissioner, but it fell when the 2024 general election was called. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 amended data protection law without abolishing either. The commissioner post sat vacant from August 2024 until Professor William Webster took office on 1 November 2025. The commissioners themselves have repeatedly warned that a network this large lacks a governance framework of its own, which is an unusually direct admission from inside the system.
The precedent worth knowing
In 2013 the ICO upheld a complaint brought by Big Brother Watch, Privacy International, and No CCTV about Hertfordshire Constabulary's ANPR "ring of steel" around the town of Royston. The ICO found that the force had not carried out any effective assessments and that logging every vehicle entering the town was unlawful under the Data Protection Act 1998.
That is the shape of a winnable British argument. Not "surveillance is bad," but "this specific deployment is disproportionate to the problem it claims to address, and you did not properly assess it before installing it."
How to research it here
- Freedom of Information Act 2000 requests, force by force. There are more than 40 territorial forces in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, each a separate public authority. Scotland has its own regime under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, overseen by the Scottish Information Commissioner.
- WhatDoTheyKnow publishes requests and responses, so check whether your question has already been answered before filing.
- Ask for the data protection impact assessment. It should state the purpose, the legal basis, the retention period, and the proportionality argument, and it is the single most useful document to obtain.
- Ask for retention periods and access figures, including how many searches of national systems the force made in a given period and what internal audit exists. Do not assume a retention period, get it in writing.
- Expect refusals on exact camera locations. Law enforcement exemptions are routinely applied. The refusal is not the end of the process, and the reasoning in it is often informative.
- Make a subject access request for data the force holds about you, which is a separate right from FOI and sometimes more productive.
- Complain to the ICO where a force cannot articulate a proportionality assessment. The Royston case shows the route works.
Big Brother Watch has campaigned on ANPR for over a decade and its research is the best starting point for the political argument. Privacy International and the Open Rights Group cover the wider surveillance landscape, including facial recognition deployments that increasingly sit alongside these camera networks.