Clause 23 - Documents produced or found

Part of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 10:45 am on 25 October 2005.

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Photo of Humfrey Malins Humfrey Malins Shadow Minister, (Assisted By Shadow Law Officers) 10:45, 25 October 2005

I see the hon. Gentleman nodding furiously. Perhaps I do him an unkindness. He is extremely well versed in such matters, and perhaps he intended to shake his head.

The people who work in the immigration service are inevitably hard-working and diligent, and do their best. I have no criticism of them or their integrity, but I have a criticism of the system in which passports get lost and are not found for months.

I want to mention a particular case. I should like the Minister to comment, not necessarily on this particular case, but on the general principle of people being able to lay their hands on their passport quickly. The case involves J, a long-term overstayer, who applied to stay in the UK with her husband, who was settled here. Nothing happened; it was taking for ever to get a response, and in June 2003, J decided to return to Gambia with her British-born, British-citizen children, and apply for entry clearance from there. The Home Office promised to return the passport. It did not, so further inquiries were made, and it said that it would return her passport at the airport. She booked a flight, got to the airport, and there was no passport. It took months before she was given her old passport, by which time it had expired, and was able to submit it to her high commissioner and obtain a new one. She finally travelled from the UK in January 2004. She obtained her entry clearance, although that was not a speedy process either, and in November 2004 was able to return to the UK with her daughters and with leave as a spouse to remain with her husband.

That is a not untypical case, and I venture to suggest that there are hon. Members in this Committee who have, from time to time, telephoned the immigration hotline—a number known only to Members of Parliament, for obvious reasons—and asked the person at the other end, “Where is the passport of my constituent x? They are sick of waiting for it and want to travel.” It can take ages—days, sometimes weeks—for a passport to be located. Sometimes I get an answer to the effect that it is somewhere in the system, and they cannot lay their hands on it. If it takes a Member of Parliament time to get hold of a document, or to get an answer, members of the public are disadvantaged. I hope that the Minister will be able to give me some assurance in the stand part debate that systems exist within the Home Office to ensure that there will be availability and accessibility to documents that have been retained indefinitely for any purpose, particularly   for those seeking to travel. In particular, people will obviously need to prove their identity in other walks of life, so why not give them a full, certified photocopy of it?

Finally, I have five questions for the stand part debate. In what circumstances is a passport required with an appeal? When would a person described in proposed new sub-paragraph (c), whose passport is retained beyond the time when he or she is about to depart or to be removed, get their passport back? What will happen in the case of the new out-of-country appeals proposed under clause 1 and in existing cases in which the appeal is out of country? The Minister alluded to that briefly, but can he explain it more fully? Could a passport be retained in any circumstances after a person has returned to their country? What about human rights cases heard out of country because they are certified as clearly unfounded? Would it be possible to retain the passports of those people beyond the time when they leave the UK?

If a passport is returned to a person after their plane has landed in another country or during the journey, who will have the passport in the meantime? Will it always be in the possession of an immigration officer or a consular official? What steps will be taken to ensure that the person gets their passport back and that their safety is not compromised if the handover of the passport is witnessed by local immigration officials, who might take that as suggesting that the person is in trouble with the UK authorities? Those were the queries and points that I wanted to raise in the clause stand part debate.