UK seeks EU law enforcement database access as Mahmood meets Brussels

Shabana Mahmood, the UK home secretary, is heading to Brussels on Monday to sit down with Magnus Brunner, the European Union's commissioner for home affairs. The meeting marks the second time these two officials have met in as many months, and it arrives at a moment when Britain is actively exploring what it might regain from the security and law enforcement systems it lost when it left the European Union.

The timing is deliberate. Just days before Mahmood's trip, Prime Minister Andy Burnham told Parliament that he wants to restore the UK's access to European databases for sharing immigration data—systems the country has been locked out of since Brexit. At his recent meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in New York, Burnham said, the conversation turned to what practical arrangements might be possible. He framed data access as a matter of control that Britain surrendered and should now reclaim, and he has signaled he intends to raise the issue formally at an EU-UK summit scheduled for November.

On the table for Monday's discussion are two databases in particular. Eurodac is the newer system, a platform that collects fingerprints and facial images of asylum seekers as young as six years old, along with security flags marking individuals linked to terrorism or serious crime. The Schengen Information System, or SIS, is older and broader—it holds records on missing persons, stolen vehicles, number plates, and fugitives moving across EU internal borders. The SIS alone processes roughly twenty million searches daily, the vast majority of them vehicle-related checks. Both systems represent the kind of real-time intelligence sharing that British law enforcement has found itself without since the country's departure from the EU.

Brunner's visit extends beyond Mahmood. He is scheduled to meet with Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, and will visit the National Counter Terrorism Security Office. He will also meet with senior officials from the UK's child sexual abuse centre to discuss joint efforts against such crimes. On Wednesday, he is delivering a lecture at King's College London focused on migration and asylum, where he plans to discuss the European Union's new Pact on Migration and Asylum—a framework of ten pieces of legislation designed to overhaul how the EU manages its borders, processes asylum applications, and shares information among member states.

The backdrop to these conversations is a measurable shift in migration patterns. Frontex data released on Monday showed a 43 percent decline in small boat crossings of the Channel. Across the EU's external borders more broadly, illegal crossings have fallen 55 percent over two years, with a further third-of-the-remaining-total drop this year. Asylum applications have reached record lows in countries that were once primary destinations. Brunner has attributed this progress partly to the new EU legislation and partly to a shift in political priorities around migration in major EU nations including Germany, Italy, and France. He has also credited the UK's own enforcement efforts, calling the country's contribution to suppressing irregular migration "indispensable."

Burnham's framing of data access as a control issue rather than a security concession signals a subtle shift in how the government is approaching the post-Brexit relationship with Europe. Rather than presenting rejoining these systems as a capitulation, the government is positioning it as a practical recovery of tools that serve British interests. The November summit will be the formal stage for testing whether the EU is willing to grant that access, and under what terms. For now, the Home Office has declined to comment on the specifics of what is being negotiated.