On Monday 4th January, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner accused the Home Secretary of forgetting about the “practical issues” facing the police forces as she remains too focused on cutting illegal immigration.
Lord Blair expressed his frustration at how recently negotiated Brexit deal had resulted in the UK having less crime-fighting powers especially after Priti Patel promised that police and security services would get “tougher powers” to keep the country safe post Brexit. She had previously claimed that the Government would ban foreign criminals from entering, reject unreliable national identity cards, and crack down on smuggling from Europe.
Speaking at BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Lord Blair, said, “I am afraid it is basically the fact that we have lost powers, we have lost the European Arrest Warrant which we used to send 12,000 suspects back to Europe for trial in the last decade and (bring) 1,600 of our own offenders back.
“We have lost full access to Europe-wide interrogatable databases on criminal records, DNA, fingerprints, criminal intelligence. I think what the Home Secretary has been doing is concentrating on illegal immigration and this new idea about shortening the amount of time somebody has to spend in prison before they can be deported, here, and has forgotten the real, practical issues facing officers in their cars as we speak today.”
However, a Home Office source in a statement to The Daily Mail said, “The EU took the position throughout that it was legally impossible for them to offer SIS II (the Schengen Information System II database) to any third country outside the Schengen area. We will therefore use tried and tested mechanisms of cooperation via Interpol and bilateral channels, which we already use with the rest of the world – and which we used with EU Member States until 2015.”
The EU and UK have implemented limited information sharing and other measures to maintain security functions under the new trade deal.
