Mr. Alan Todd:

Starting with the Brexit element, I have attended a range of meetings on the topic in Belfast, Dublin and elsewhere. It is difficult to plan for something when we do not know what it is. Even getting central government to define the parameters or working assumptions has not been straightforward because of the negotiation position and changing situation. That is understandable but it does not make it any easier for people like me and my colleagues to plan for it.

It would be fair to summarise what the PSNI has done to date as looking at the range of cross-Border work it currently does and has done over recent times, looking at which of those pieces of work rely on European instruments, legislation or regulations, and trying to work out, if those were lost, how to maintain the current position. European arrest warrants allow us to bring people from North to South and South to North for offences. That is well practised and routine. What would be the position if there were no European arrest warrants?

Information sharing is the lifeblood of North-South, UK-wide and Europe-wide operations. That information sharing, across a range of disciplines, is lifeblood to many policing operations. Which parts of that and which access to those systems requires European regulation, and what would be needed if we did not have them? The PSNI is taking account of all those and telling the Department of Justice and other partners that those are where the gaps will be and those need to be filled. That forms the basis for that plan.

There are things that we have control over, like meetings, face-to-face exchanges, secondments from North to South and South to North, the building and maintaining of relationships across the Border, and the joint task force on organised crime. Those will continue as structures. The PSNI continues to look behind the scenes at what bits of that might fall off, so to speak, in a Brexit scenario and how to make sure they do not fall off, or there is something else in their place to ensure we lose nothing.

A previous chief constable got into political hot water by saying the Border is just a line on a map. I know what he meant, and it was not the way it was heard, but the Border does have challenges for law enforcement and other agencies and we have learned how to work with that. Having got to that space, we need not to lose it. That is how I would sum up the work on Brexit to date.

The longer piece of two-year, five-year and ten-year plans has to come when we know what we are dealing with and we have a stronger sense of what is available to us, what we want in addition, and how that is taken forward. That piece of work will have to wait.