Baroness Ludford (LD)

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 26 in this group, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord German, on co-operation with Europol. I think the reason it has been grouped here is that it would help boost the effectiveness of the Border Security Commander. The Government recently published the implementation report on the trade and co-operation agreement with the EU. It was implemented in 2023-24, so this was a bit out of date by the time it was published just last month. Under the section on “Law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters”, there is a paragraph that says that: “Under the TCA, the UK continues to co-operate with Europol and it continues to have a strong multi-agency liaison bureau at The Hague delivering operational activity against the most significant crime groups”. There is one interesting reference in the trade and co-operation agreement—for the nerds out there, it is at Article 568, paragraph 7. It says that: “Liaison officers from the United Kingdom and representatives of the competent authorities of the United Kingdom may be invited to operational meetings”. That sums up the challenge that we have outside the European Union. We only “may” be invited. We have no rights. It is all grace and favour. I watched the recent session of the Home Affairs Committee in the other place with the Border Security Commander, Martin Hewitt, and the National Crime Agency’s director general for operations, Rob Jones. Asked about European co-operation, Mr Hewitt said, “we retained really good … law enforcement co-operation”. However, Mr Jones amplified that by saying, “we have mitigated the impact” of Brexit and “we have recovered those relationships in terms of law enforcement” and have positive joint operations. He also said: “We have more people in Europol than we have ever had”. I assume he was thinking that the committee would be impressed by that, but I believe he was making the best of a bad job. I imagine that we have more people at Europol than ever before because, whereas in the past British police officers could access European databases from their desks in the UK, now we need a host of liaison officers attached to Europol HQ to handle the red tape of individual information requests and to run around seeing whether we might be invited to meetings.