Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Report stage
Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I will not be quite as brief as that, but I will try to be brief.

I rise to support Amendment 33 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, which I have co-sponsored. It is surely right that the failure to produce identifying documents should be a factor—I put it no stronger than that—in assessing the credibility of a claimant. The destruction of identity documents has long been a means of undermining our asylum system. As I mentioned in Committee, we overcame a similar problem for those arriving by air simply by photographing the documents before they got on the plane, so if they stuck them down the loo, it was not going to help them, and that had been going on for some considerable time.

It is no accident that today, 98% of all cross-channel arrivals, whether by truck or boat, have no documents. Indeed, it is not in dispute that people smugglers instruct them to destroy any documents to reduce the risk of being returned to their home countries. In many cases, the applicants are making fools of us. Surely, the least we can do is to specify in law a requirement to take into consideration the absence of documents as a factor in judging the applicant’s credibility. I can think of no reason why that should not be the case and I strongly support the amendment put down by the noble Baroness.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I rise briefly to support this amendment. I had an opportunity years ago, when we were part of the European Union, to participate in an inquiry about FRONTEX and to go to Heathrow Airport to see the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Green, has just addressed. We were asked to be there at 8.30 in the morning to see what happened when people arrived at Heathrow on the overnight flights. Issues that have since been cured, largely, were then putting the immigration officers under enormous strain.

For example, on the day that we were there, a young man from Australia arrived who claimed to be British, but he came without any documentation; and a man from Brazil arrived for a holiday but without any money, so he was obviously going to work. Most significantly, a man on a flight from Nigeria claimed that he could not speak any of the languages available through interpreters at terminal 3, which is quite a wide range. I asked the reason for that, and they said that he will not speak until the flights back to Nigeria have left, and then he will start to speak, because otherwise he will be put back on the next flight to Nigeria. This was a prevalent issue, but I think it has now largely been tackled for the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Green. It was a huge gap in our ability to provide control. Those measures are not applicable to channel crossings, but we do need to find ways to tackle this issue, just as the noble Lord, Lord Green, described how we tackled it at airports. In the absence of that, we need to make it clear in law that the lack of clarity referred to by my noble friend when she moved the amendment should be taken into account by immigration officials.