Strange. That seems to go against the Home Office's own Code of Practice
"13 3.2.2 Any proposed deployment that includes audio recording in a public place is likely to require a strong justification of necessity to establish its proportionality. There is a strong presumption that a surveillance camera system must not be used to record conversations as this is highly intrusive and unlikely to be justified"
I hope they've taken good legal advice.
I just realized that it forgets about deaf and mute people. Why do we have surveillance cameras and are fine with it because they at least don't listen in on our conversations but draw the line on audio recording, when all this time video surveillance was already intruding on the privacy of the conversations of deaf and mute people who have to rely on sign languages to communicate?
(note this isn't me defending audio or video recording, fuck that. this is just me realizing how that specific law doesn't account for disabilities)
There are probably technical things they can do to reduce the risk, such as only actually record audio above a set audio pressure level.