Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will meet EU Home Affairs Commissioner Magnus Brunner on Monday for talks on migration, border management, law enforcement cooperation, and counter-terrorism. It is their second meeting in two months, a tempo that signals genuine negotiating momentum rather than diplomatic theatre. The headline agenda item is the UK rejoining European police and security databases it lost access to after Brexit. Two systems are central: Eurodac, which collects fingerprints and facial images of asylum seekers from age six and flags individuals linked to terrorism or serious crime; and the Schengen Information System (SIS), a database covering missing persons, stolen goods, vehicles, and fugitives that handles roughly 20 million searches daily. The diplomatic context is shaped by Andy Burnham, who has used his role to publicly push for restored data-sharing on immigration. Burnham told MPs that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen showed "openness to the conversation about restoring data sharing" during a meeting in New York, and framed the lost database access as lost "control" — a deliberate inversion of the Leave campaign's own language. He is targeting a practical arrangement at the EU-UK summit in November. Brunner arrives in London with useful gifts. Frontex data published Monday shows a 43% decline in small boat Channel crossings, and the commissioner credits the EU's Pact on Migration and Asylum — a 10-piece legislative overhaul of border management, asylum processing, and information-sharing among member states. Illegal crossings at EU external borders are down 55% over two years, with asylum applications at record lows in key destination countries. Brunner will argue these reforms are "paying off" for the UK too. Beyond the database discussions, Brunner will meet MI5 Director General Ken McCallum, visit the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, and meet senior officials from the UK's child sexual abuse centre. He will also deliver a lecture at King's College London on the EU migration pact's impact — a public-facing move that frames the EU as the partner with a functioning system the UK needs access to. The power dynamics are worth noting. The UK is the supplicant here. It chose to leave these systems and now needs to negotiate re-entry, likely on terms that reflect Brussels' leverage. The EU's willingness to engage is real but transactional — Brunner's language that the UK's "contribution is indispensable" is an invitation wrapped in a price tag. The Home Office has not commented, which is itself informative. The political sensitivity of publicly seeking to rejoin EU structures remains acute enough that the department handling the negotiations won't acknowledge them on the record.
