No-deal Brexit would make Britons less safe,
ex-national security adviser says
Failing to reach deal UK would lose access to Schengen
database and would need to resort to time-consuming workarounds
Dan Sabbagh
Defence and security editor
Fri 11 Dec
2020 06.00 GMT
A former
national security adviser has warned that Britons would be “all less safe” in
the event of a no-deal Brexit, as the UK will lose real-time access to a string
of European crime databases which cannot easily be replaced.
Lord
Ricketts said British police face “a serious capability gap” from the end of
the year unless the EU and UK can strike a trade and security deal because “the
fallbacks are all slower and more clunky”.
No deal, he
said, would see Britain definitively lose access to the Schengen database
containing information about who is wanted or missing across the EU, replacing
it with an Interpol system that is not integrated into UK police or border
systems.
British
wanted notices have to be manually inputted into the Interpol system as part of
an effort that has required an extra 60 law enforcement staff and which police
conceded last month “will have a major operational impact” on investigations.
“Workarounds
for access to the databases would all involve more time and effort. And in this
business speed equals security so loss of real-time connectivity makes us all
less safe,” added Ricketts, who is now a crossbench peer.
The UK
wants to secure access to the Schengen system, which has information about
nearly one million people, as part of the overall post-Brexit deal. While
security is not seen as a sticking point in the negotiations, the EU has
refused to carve out a separate security deal if the trade talks fail.
A no-deal
contingency agreement outlined by Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission
president, on Thursday made no reference to security, prompting one former
senior Whitehall insider to claim Brussels was using the issue “as a pressure
point”.
UK police
have been scrambling to introduce a patchwork of measures to deal with the loss
of access to other databases as the uncertainty continues, including the
Passenger Name Records (PNR) system, which tracks travel details, and Prüm,
which contains DNA and fingerprint records.
They admit
there is no complete alternative to either. Last month, Martin Hewitt, chair of
the National Police Chiefs’ Council, warned that losing Prüm would mean “the UK
would need to revert to individual manual exchanges of data via Interpol
channels on a case by case basis”.
Prüm is
relatively new, with the UK connected since July 2019, but is rapidly proving
its worth, Hewitt added. British officers have already made 12,000 DNA matches
against data held by 11 countries also linked to the system.
Earlier in
the Commons, Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Brexit spokeswoman, said the government
had been “unable to tell us how border officers and the police would access
security data” under no deal.
She called
on Penny Mordaunt, the paymaster-general, to give an assurance that “the
security of the British people will be in no way undermined” if Boris Johnson
could not reach a deal with Brussels.
“I do not
believe that any European member state would wish to affect or compromise the
security of its own citizens,” Mordaunt replied, adding in the event there was
no deal: “We have measures in place to ensure that our citizens will be safe.”
Home Office
officials said that recovering sovereign control over UK borders would bring
other security benefits, with customs screening on goods helping in targeting
guns and drugs.
Ending free movement would also allow Britain to ban entry to criminals sentenced to more than one year if the information was available to border force staff at ports of entry to the UK
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