My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for raising the issue and of course I understand the concerns that lie behind it.
Clause 18 adds two new behaviours to the existing credibility provisions in Section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004. It introduces the principles that providing late evidence without good reason or not acting in good faith should be damaging to the claimant’s credibility. Where, conversely, there are good reasons for providing evidence late, that would not affect the claimant’s credibility.
The concept that certain conduct should be damaging to credibility is not new. Decision-makers must already consider the claimant’s conduct. It is then open to the Home Office or the courts to decide the extent to which credibility should subsequently be damaged. The focus of Clause 18 is, therefore, the Home Office and then the judicial decision-making process. It is intended to address the issue of late evidence raised in unfounded protection and human rights claims and put beyond doubt that behaviour designed to abuse the system will be taken into account. Clause 18, therefore, is intended to apply to those individuals who have made a protection or human rights claim and have been issued with an evidence notice as per Clause 17. It is not intended to apply, for example, to individuals immediately when intercepted in the territorial waters of the United Kingdom.
Against that background, I suggest that Amendment 33 is unnecessary. The destruction, alteration or disposal of a passport without reasonable explanation, or the failure to produce a passport on request to an immigration officer or to the Secretary of State—again, without reasonable explanation—are behaviours to which Section 8 already applies. The good faith requirement in the Bill is intended to address behaviours such as those mentioned in the amendment, as well as any other behaviours that a deciding authority thinks are not in good faith. Specific instances of a lack of good faith are necessarily caught by the broader provision that refers to good faith: the greater includes the lesser. Therefore, there is no need to single out the behaviours prescribed in this amendment.
As to the detail of the amendment, I say that verification of someone’s identity normally takes place on land. However, should a claimant be in possession of their passport or identity document and fail to provide this when requested by an immigration officer, Section 8 will apply, as I said. Moreover, where evidence is provided late following receipt of an evidence notice in a protection or human rights claim—again, without good reason—this should be taken into account as damaging the claimant’s credibility.
As this amendment refers to specific examples of behaviour designed to abuse the system, and that type of behaviour as a whole is already caught by the provisions of the Bill, I respectfully suggest that the amendment is necessarily unnecessary. For those reasons, I respectfully invite my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe to withdraw it.