A former national security adviser has warned that Britons would be “all less safe” in the event of a no-deal Brexit, as the UK will lose real-time access to a string of European crime databases which cannot easily be replaced. Lord Ricketts said British police face “a serious capability gap” from the end of the year unless the EU and UK can strike a trade and security deal because “the fallbacks are all slower and more clunky”. No deal, he said, would see Britain definitively lose access to the Schengen database containing information about who is wanted or missing across the EU, replacing it with an Interpol system that is not integrated into UK police or border systems. British wanted notices have to be manually inputted into the Interpol system as part of an effort that has required an extra 60 law enforcement staff and which police conceded last month “will have a major operational impact” on investigations. “Workarounds for access to the databases would all involve more time and effort. And in this business speed equals security so loss of real-time connectivity makes us all less safe,” added Ricketts, who is now a crossbench peer. The UK wants to secure access to the Schengen system, which has information about nearly one million people, as part of the overall post-Brexit deal. While security is not seen as a sticking point in the negotiations, the EU has refused to carve out a separate security deal if the trade talks fail. A no-deal contingency agreement outlined by Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission president, on Thursday made no reference to security, prompting one former senior Whitehall insider to claim Brussels was using the issue “as a pressure point”. UK police have been scrambling to introduce a patchwork of measures to deal with the loss of access to other databases as the uncertainty continues, including the Passenger Name Records (PNR) system, which tracks travel details, and Prüm, which contains DNA and fingerprint records. They admit there is no complete alternative to either. Last month, Martin Hewitt, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, warned that losing Prüm would mean “the UK would need to revert to individual manual exchanges of data via Interpol channels on a case by case basis”. Prüm is relatively new, with the UK connected since July 2019, but is rapidly proving its worth, Hewitt added. British officers have already made 12,000 DNA matches against data held by 11 countries also linked to the system. Earlier in the Commons, Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Brexit spokeswoman, said the government had been “unable to tell us how border officers and the police would access security data” under no deal. She called on Penny Mordaunt, the paymaster-general, to give an assurance that “the security of the British people will be in no way undermined” if Boris Johnson could not reach a deal with Brussels. “I do not believe that any European member state would wish to affect or compromise the security of its own citizens,” Mordaunt replied, adding in the event there was no deal: “We have measures in place to ensure that our citizens will be safe.” Home Office officials said that recovering sovereign control over UK borders would bring other security benefits, with customs screening on goods helping in targeting guns and drugs. Ending free movement would also allow Britain to ban entry to criminals sentenced to more than one year if the information was available to border force staff at ports of entry to the UK. A Home Office spokesperson said: “Government and police have prepared extensively over the past three years. Our plans are well-developed and well-rehearsed.”