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.