Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she made of the effectiveness of the arrangements to perform real-time security checks with EU countries.

The UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement provides a comprehensive package of capabilities that ensures we can work with counterparts across Europe to tackle crime and terrorism, protecting the public and bringing criminals to justice.

The UK and EU Member States routinely exchange information on persons of interest, including missing and wanted individuals, and on lost and stolen documents using the INTERPOL system. There is an automated upload of incoming INTERPOL circulations to UK domestic systems. Information is available via policing systems within minutes of receipt and is available at the border within 24 hours. If the National Crime Agency is notified a case is urgent, then specific alerts can be uploaded to domestic systems more rapidly.

Delivery of technical capabilities through the International Law Enforcement Alerts Platform (I-LEAP) is further enhancing the UK’s connectivity to INTERPOL by providing UK law enforcement with real-time access to INTERPOL nominal data (people) and objects of interest (stolen motor vehicles; stolen, lost and fraudulent travel documents).