My Lords, I have six amendments in this group. They refer to the United Kingdom having continued access after withdrawal to passenger name records, to the Schengen Information System, to the European arrest warrant, to membership of Europol, to the European Criminal Records Information System, and to the fingerprint and DNA exchange with the EU under the Prüm Council decisions.
The questions put to the Minister by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, went to the heart of the matter—that is, given that the Prime Minister said in her Munich speech that she wishes to see a treaty replace all these
elements of the existing arrangements, the Minister should simply tell us the process by which we will be negotiating the treaty. This debate, as with many others, gives the complete lie to the ridiculous assertion that no deal is better than a bad deal. Let us be clear: if there is no deal on 29 March next year, the current arrangements to which the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, referred, painstakingly negotiated over many years, for the European arrest warrant and the very high levels of engagement between the member states of the European Union—which the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said were so important to his work as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police—all fall.
Is the Minister going to tell us that the security of this country will be as safe as it is now if all those arrangements fall? I assume that he is not, in which case the United Kingdom leaving the European Union with no deal at the end of March next year would be a complete abdication of the national interest. We need to get that firmly established. As we have more of these debates and see the precise benefits of the EU—which, after all, are the reason we went into the European Union—it becomes clearer and clearer that leaving with no deal would be a dereliction of the national interest.