Clause 2 - Entering United Kingdom without passport
Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Bill
2:30 pm
Ms Beverley Hughes (Minister of State (Citizenship and Immigration), Home Office; Stretford and Urmston, Labour)
The hon. Gentleman said that, in the circumstances that he outlined, an immigration officer at a screening unit who was presented with somebody without a document would, in practice, invariably arrest that person on the reasonable suspicion that they had committed an offence by not having a document. Does he not accept that where a person claimed that they had entered the UK lawfully and had, therefore, used a passport, the official would check the facts, assess the story's credibility—including claims that the situation in that person's country had changed substantially—and make a judgment? Does he not accept that immigration officials make judgments about credibility all the time, at every stage of the process? If there were no reasonable suspicion that the person had no document, the reasonable thing—this is what I would expect—would be to allow that person to produce the document that they claimed to possess.