The latest facial recognition kit could soon be rolling into action on a Gloucestershire street near you, thanks to a government pledge to give £55.5m to police forces to deploy the technology.

The plan includes a spend of £4m on mobile vans that will blanket screen facial recognition software in real time to identify people already on police radar – the Home Office's declared aim being to target repeat shoplifters.

Many retailers across Gloucestershire are likely to welcome the move, announced today, along with a government initiative to create a separate offence for assault on a retail worker which could carry six months' prison sentence and fines up to £10,000.

But in Stroud – identified by Punchline-Gloucester.com as a county hotspot for shoplifting after it suffered a reported 78% surge in 2022  – there is scepticism among shopkeepers that promised changes will help turn the tide.

Tony Davey, who chairs Stroud Chamber of Trade and owns the Party on Up store on London Road, said he was sceptical of today's announcement.

Mr Davey said: "We have our own AI facial recognition technology already; it tracks people across rooms and facial recognition technology as announced today is a great step forward, because we have all seen how useless CCTV images can be."

Street-level deployment in Stroud, given the town's national profile as the home of protest and civil liberty, he said, would be controversial, but he added: "If we want to tackle shoplifting and expect greater reliance on bobbies on the beat – and the resource costs that brings – it just isn't realistic. So it could be seen as a necessary evil."

However, he added that any van roll-out, combined with the government announcement of a specific offence for assault on retailers, offered no reassurance to shopkeepers struggling to deal with theft.

He said: "We already have a radio communication system called Stroudsafe which enables us to warn each other and, if a PCSO is available, they can be alerted to any ongoing problem."

But in a recent incident where the system was activated and a shoplifter was detained who had returned to a store after taking items on an earlier visit, he said that Metropolitan police later dropped the case through "insufficient evidence".

"We have had five such incidents in the last year, and they point to a truth that questions these headline announcements made just ahead of an election. It's just grandstanding."

Amid a judicial system that is overloaded, and with prisons at peak capacity, he said there was a "disconnect between neighbourhood policing and police HQ to record and process crime", with the net effect being that true retail crime trends in Gloucestershire are simply not being reported.

"In 13 years of trading, the issue is at its highest. Is it about need? Is it hell. People are doing it because they feel they can get away with it, and while the number of people successfully shoplifting is down, the number of attempts is way up."

The British Retail Consortium welcomed the news today - pointing out that retailers spent more than £1bn last year of crime deterrence.

But the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch has meanwhile condemned the announcement today, warning that with no facial recognition law in the UK, more than 3,000 people have already been wrongly recognised by the software, which was shown to be 85% inaccurate in the Met and South Wales police areas between 2016 and 2023.

Silkie Carlo, spokesperson, told Punchline-Gloucester.com: "This Orwellian tech has no place in Britain. Criminals should be brought to justice, but papering over the cracks of broken policing with Orwellian tech is not the solution.

"It is completely absurd to inflict mass surveillance on the general public under the premise of fighting theft while police are failing to even turn up to 40% of violent shoplifting incidents or to properly investigate many more serious crimes."