A SPECIAL Scottish police squad set up to ensure public order during Brexit is to stay on standby until next spring, The Herald can reveal.

Senior officers have confirmed that their national Flexible Response Unit will continue to operate until at least April 2022.

The team – abbreviated to FRU in writing but pronounced “frew” – was set up as a temporary, emergency measure early in 2019 as the UK prepared to leave the EU, potentially without a deal.

Its life was first extended last year as police chiefs braced themselves for potential tensions due to Covid and the resulting lockdown.

Now, with the pandemic still raging and world leaders to gather in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit, the national force has decided it still needs a national public order squad.

Mark Williams, the assistant chief constable responsible for operational support, said FRU was a “product of the times, of the policing environment, of the societal environment.”

Police Scotland is not predicting riots because of Brexit or Covid or COP-26, but is making sure that it has the ability to handle what its planners call “reasonable worst-case scenarios”.

The force has already mobilised FRU to help police a whole series of events and demonstrations, planned and spontaneous, since it was set up. The squad now has 225 officers based in Jackton, South Lanarkshire; Glenrothes, Fife; Edinburgh and Dundee. It did have 300, but lower demand in the north of Scotland prompted police chiefs to scale down the unit.

Mr Williams explained why its life had been prolonged. “Brexit came and went and then we were hit with the pandemic and with a number of implications of events elsewhere in the world, such as Black Lives Matter, the growth of climate protest and Extinction Rebellion.”

Scotland saw high profile and largely peaceful demonstrations last summer as part of a global week of protests. They require, however, a public order policing response.

There were particular concerns as football hooligans in Glasgow took sides on BLM with some

law enforcement sources warning of a “proxy war”.

Scotland, however, has not experienced the disorder seen in London and elsewhere.

“That is a product of Scotland and it is not necessary reflected elsewhere in the UK in certain areas,” Mr Williams said.

“We enjoy a very positive relationship with the public and we have a level of peacefulness. There are protests and there is occasionally disorder, but it’s small and it’s ‘scale’.”

Mr Williams said highly trained public order officers in FRU had been very helpful in keeping people safe since they were mobilised.

He said: “The flexible resource we had was very well engaged. It was very busy.

“It give us an immediate response to events which might require more highly trained officers.” The men and women of FRU are taught how to handle trouble, primarily through communication skills to de-escalate situations, not force.

They are usually in normal uniforms. But they also have access to specialist equipment, shields, helmets and visors, that most people would see as a “riot police”.

Mr Williams said: “What we have to prepare and plan for as a police service is the contingency of what is a reasonable worse-case scenario.

“We never take a really large football game lightly if there is intelligence to say there might be clashes between opposing fans. We do not take a far-right march lightly.

“There may be very few arrests but we will police it robustly.”

He added that he was “touching wood” as he said putting visible, well-trained officers and commanders in to protest situations was paying off.

FRU, Mr Williams said, was “cost neutral in so far as the officers are on the payroll anyway”.

But it has meant transferring officers from local policing.

However, having a national squad to help to police events also takes pressure off services around the country.

Crucially, FRU officers are on shift patterns which reflect their demand.

That helps mitigate the age-old policing problem that happens when officers have to get rest days to make up for covering football matches or demonstrations at weekends.

Mr Williams said: “It is not a perfectly fluid model.

“Obviously if you take somebody away from local response policing in to a different role there is never going to be a perfect fit.”

Scotland a decade ago, before the single force, would have struggled to have maintained a national public order squad, even temporarily, he said.

Mr Williams said: “I think one of the advantages of being a single service has been our ability to stand up a resource of this scale and nature with the training all its officers have.

“FRU can be stood up or stood down or flexed based on the single service structure we now have.”