Clause 2 - Entering United Kingdom without passport
Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Bill
10:00 am
Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow Cathcart, Labour)
The hon. Member for Woking encouraged hon. Members on both sides of the Committee to express our thoughts, so I shall do so. I was grateful for his illuminating comments and found the scenarios that he painted very helpful in examining the clause. He made the point, not for the first time during our discussions, that we must prosecute only those who have deliberately destroyed the travel documents that can identify them.
We come up against that issue time and again: how do we identify those who have not been issued with identity papers, and those who have been issued with such papers but who have subsequently destroyed them in transit? Is it enough for us simply to ask people who have arrived in the UK, ''Did you have identity papers when you started your journey? Where are they now and did you voluntarily destroy them?'' We can be confident that 100 per cent. of those who arrive in the country without documents will claim either that they were never issued them in the first place, or that they were forced to destroy them by the people traffickers. I cannot imagine an asylum seeker arriving in the UK and voluntarily admitting that they destroyed the papers of their own volition.