Agenda item

Motion E

Proposed by Cllr Joseph Ejiofor

Seconded by Cllr Zena Brabazon

Fair Funding

Haringey, like most urban boroughs in the UK, has suffered from the past 10 years of Tory Austerity.

Haringey Council’s experienced a reduction to our resources of nearly 59% over the last decade, while shire areas have seen reductions averaging 13%.

Over the same period, Haringey’s population grew by 12% (compared to just 7% across shire areas), 33% of Haringey residents live in relative poverty after housing costs and 12.6% of Haringey residents live in fuel poverty – which is the fourth highest in London.

The Government’s review of relative needs and resources, previously referred to as the “Fair Funding Review”, has been underway since 2016. It will establish new baseline funding levels for local authorities from April 2021 for the next few years.

This Council calls upon Boris Johnson’s Government to put the “Fair” into the “Fair Funding Review”.

We believe that the funding of local government, and with it the delivery of multiple services that our residents depend upon, should firstly be dictated by need.

This Council believes that:

• 

• population growth should be reflected through the use projections that reflect London’s faster rate of population growth than other areas;
• deprivation should be accurately reflected in the new formula including the higher cost of housing in London; and
• the area cost adjustment should continue to reflect London’s unique property and labour markets and the impact these have on costs for London boroughs
• no council should be worse off as a result of the review – there should not be a transfer of resources from urban areas to the shires.

This Council resolves to:

• Work with like-minded authorities, London Councils, and the Local Government Association to secure a funding settlement for Local Government that truly addresses the pressures that Councils have been under these past 10 years
• Engage with Members of Parliament with whom we are associated to ensure that the Chancellor understands that “levelling up” means that resources should be distributed according to need.
• Support a broader local campaign that ensures that the specific local challenges that Haringey faces can be addressed by fair funding from national government

Motion F

Proposed  by Cllr Rossetti

Seconded by  Cllr Ogiehor

Declaring a moratorium on live facial recognition surveillance

This Council notes:

1. That Haringey Council currently operates 75 CCTV cameras and this number is estimated to rise to 150 in the near future
2. The Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group defines Live Facial Recognition as “the automated one-to-many ‘matching’ of near real-time video images of individuals with a curated ‘watchlist’ of facial images.”
3. That the use of live facial recognition surveillance in public places by both public and private sectors is expanding
4. That for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018 taking a photo of someone’s face and processing their facial biometrics constitutes sensitive personal data
5. That privacy is a human right and is protected as such under the Human Rights Act 1998
6. That police forces in the UK, including the Metropolitan Police, have deployed facial recognition surveillance on members of the public at shopping centres, festivals, sports events, concerts, community events and a demonstration, including deploying live facial recognition surveillance to monitor and identify innocent protestors and people with mental health problems, none of whom were wanted by the police
7. On the 24^th January 2020, the Metropolitan Police announced it would “begin the operational use of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology.”
8. The cost to the Metropolitan Police of facial recognition surveillance software and hardware, excluding the operational costs of deployments, currently stands at £240,000
9. That facial recognition technology is often unreliable especially when trying to identify women, people of colour, transgender people and young people. The Metropolitan Police’s internal testing of facial recognition surveillance technology found demographic bias amongst the results
10. That live facial recognition is inaccurate. For example, a report by the Human Rights, Big Data & Technology Project at Essex University found that during a trial of a facial recognition system by the Metropolitan Police conducted between June 2018 and February 2019 81% of those flagged as suspects were wrongly identified
11. That during another deployment of live facial recognition technology by the Metropolitan Police in Romford, an individual was fined £90 after electing to cover his face rather than be scanned
12. That in an answer to a written parliamentary question, the Minister for Policing stated that: “There is no legislation regulating the use of CCTV cameras with facial recognition and biometric tracking capabilities.”
13. That the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has called for a moratorium on uses of live facial recognition,^[1] in addition to 25 rights and equality groups in the UK
14. That the justice sub-committee on policing of the Scottish Parliament has concluded that “the use of live facial recognition technology would be a radical departure from Police Scotland's fundamental principle of policing by consent.” Police Scotland have abandoned plans to deploy live facial recognition surveillance.
15. That on the 14^th May 2019, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to ban the city’s public agencies from using facial recognition systems. A number of other American cities have followed suit.

This Council believes:

1. That live facial recognition is liable to abuse and has potentially enormous consequences for civil liberties and our human rights. That in particular, the use of live facial recognition for surveillance engages citizens’ rights to privacy and freedom of expression free association, as well as their protection from discrimination
2. That the potential for serious adverse consequences to arise from the deployment of live facial recognition is increased by the fact that the technology itself is still unreliable and, given its power and potential ramifications, the legal and regulatory framework surrounding it is underdeveloped
3. That the operational deployment of Facial Recognition by the Metropolitan Police will likely adversely affect Haringey Residents
4. In light of the above points, a precautionary approach should be taken to deploying Live Facial Recognition

This Council resolves:

1. To declare a moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology in Haringey

This Council, therefore, agrees:

1. That it will take no steps to acquire live facial recognition surveillance technology
2. That it will not allow live facial recognition systems to be applied to any personal data for which Haringey Council is the data controller
3. That it will only share personal data for which it is the data controller with third parties if the Council is satisfied that either the data cannot be used for live facial recognition or that the third-party has undertaken not to use it for that purpose
4. To ask the Leader of the Council to write to the Mayor of London to ask that the Metropolitan Police, Transport for London and the other agencies he is responsible for refrain from using live facial recognition technology within Haringey’s boundaries
5. To ask the Leader of the Council to convey the same request to the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police
6. To ask regulatory committee to conduct an investigation into how the Council can discourage the use by private entities of live facial recognition in a way that adversely affects civil liberties, especially with regards to public spaces, hybrid public/private spaces and large events
7. To ask the Leader of the Council to write to the Home Secretary to ask them to consider a nationwide moratorium on the deployment of live facial recognition surveillance

As per item 26.