Nicola Bulley: Latest pictures as expert underwater search team sweeps River Wyre in search for missing mum

Mr Faulding, founder and chief executive of Specialist Group International, said he was confident his team would find Ms Bulley if she did fall into the River Wyre.

Speaking to reporters shortly after arriving in St Michael’s on Wyre, he said: “If Nicola is here, I’m happy we will find her, if she’s in the river.”

You can watch our riverside interview with Peter Faulding, head of SGI, in our video player.

He said his specialist equipment, a high-tech sonar which will scan the riverbed, has a “very high hit rate”, adding: “I can find anything with that.”

“The clear evidence is the phone was by the river, the dog harness was by the river, so that’s their (the police’s) only clue at the moment and we’ve got to be allowed to eliminate this river, so we can either confirm or deny what’s in here today,” he added.

Peter Faulding – who has previously expressed doubts about the police theory that Nicola fell into the water – said it was a “particularly long” stretch of river to search and his team was a “back-up resource” for the police.

He added: “If we can’t find her in the next three or four days in this river, if she’s not here, then I’m confident that she’s not in this stretch of river. I’d be very confident of that.

“We are going to be working our hardest, we’ll probably be working under darkness tonight for a while and that’s my intention to help the family.”

These are the scenes as the search gets under way today...