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Baroness Anelay of St Johns moved Amendment No. A1:

After Clause 1, insert the following new clause—

"PROVISION OF PASSENGER INFORMATION
(1) A carrier of a person from outside the United Kingdom to a United Kingdom airport commits an offence if it fails to present the person's travel documents, or a copy of those documents, to an immigration officer in the United Kingdom on request.
(2) A carrier guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum for any one offence.
(3) A carrier shall be entitled to be reimbursed by the Secretary of State all reasonable costs incurred by it in relation to this section."

The noble Baroness said: In moving Amendment No. A1, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 2, 4 and 5, all of which stand in my name. Amendment No. 5 is supported by the noble Lords, Lord McNally and Lord Avebury.

All of these are probing amendments and are intended to ask the Government to clarify the intention behind Clause 2 and its impact on both the asylum seeker and the carrier which has brought the asylum seeker here, whether by air, sea or Eurostar. The clause was improved by the Government on Report in another place but we still have some concern.

Amendment No. A1 introduces a new clause which addresses the linked issue of how far the carrier should be responsible for ensuring that any document that has been used to gain access to plane, ship or train is both valid and available for inspection when the passenger reaches the UK. I note that an Unstarred Question on this issue has been tabled for 20 April when we shall debate the report of the European Union Sub-Committee, led by its chairman the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond. I can therefore be somewhat briefer than I might otherwise have been. On 20 April my noble friend Lord Bridgeman will set out a far more detailed examination of the case.

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I am grateful to the representatives of airlines such as British Airways and Britannia Airways who have briefed me on this matter. It is clear that the carriers are supportive of the Government's objective of ensuring that documentation that is available upon boarding is still available to be checked by an immigration officer.

The issue is about making sure that the system works well and is proportionate in its impact upon business. I tabled a new clause instead of seeking to amend the Government's own new Clause 11 for a very particular reason. I wanted to be able to signal clearly that I do not object to the Government's new Clause 11, which was inserted with virtually no debate on Report in another place. I do not want to damage it in any way. This is a stand-alone debate separate from that.

My questions are as follows. Why did the Government allow only six days for consultation on the regulatory impact assessment? Why has the Home Office rejected any parallel between fishing vessels—where Defra recently agreed to fund the installation of tracking equipment required under EU regulations—and carriers, who will be required to invest in data capture systems to do the work of the IND as their agent? What is the benefit to the carrier's business of this investment in technology, which is to provide information to the IND? What information will be required and from which categories of travellers?

I understand that the Home Office is considering covering 10 airports at the moment. Is there not a risk that the traffickers will simply switch to other airports? What account has the Home Office taken of that risk? Will the Minister give an undertaking that the order giving effect to the Home Office proposals will not be drafted, still less laid, until the following three conditions have been satisfied: first, there has been full consultation, following Cabinet Office guidelines, on all options for data capture; secondly, that the Home Office has agreed proportionality with all stakeholders; and thirdly, that the software for data capture and transmission that the Home Office needs has been developed by the Home Office in consultation with carriers?

I turn to the other issues in Clause 2 which directly affect the person who is being trafficked. We say it is right that we should make sure that people who come here to seek asylum should not deliberately destroy documents in their possession that are relevant to their claim, in order intentionally to frustrate the system. We strongly support the objective of the Government's Clause 2, provided—and it is a strong proviso—that the Government intend to punish only those who intentionally destroy documents, without being under duress from somebody such as the trafficker. We know all too well that this can be the case. We also need to consider the position of those who have never had travel or immigration documents or passports. Indeed, as I commented at Second Reading, many people would not be allowed to have such documents, for the reason that they are being persecuted in their own country from which they have to flee to seek asylum. The Home Office has, on occasion, recognised that many of the strongest applications for asylum come from individuals who have been forced to enter this country with no, or invalid, documents. It is a very fine distinction to make.

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Amendments Nos. 2 and 5 therefore replace the requirement for an immigration document—commonly one would expect a passport—with one for a document that would satisfactorily establish identity.

Of course, none of my arguments are new. They have been rehearsed in another place and by organisations that have briefed noble Lords and the Government, so I do not expect that any of the comments I have made so far come as a surprise to the Minister. Indeed, I anticipate that the Minister may say, in response to my amendments on Clause 2, that asylum seekers will be protected by the provisions of Clause 2(4)(c), since that establishes a defence if one has a reasonable excuse for not being in possession of a document that is specified in subsection (1). But, as my honourable friend Humfrey Malins made clear in another place, our problem with that is that the subsection does not confer certainty to the asylum seeker. If the Minster can today give an assurance that somebody who has not possessed the relevant document would always come within the reasonable excuse provision, then I would be more content.

Amendment No. 4—the same basic subject, but a rather different approach—comes to me as a result of a briefing from the Refugee Children's Consortium. I thank it for its briefing on this, and its careful and full briefing on the rest of the Bill. It is, as always, a very responsible and excellent resource. As I remarked earlier, the Government did improve the Bill in another place. But it seems that they have inadvertently created a problem whereby they cast the net of the offence wider than they originally intended in subsection (2) by the way in which they refer to the dependency of a child. My amendment would ensure that there is no risk of a person being prosecuted for a dependent child's lack of documents, when the two of them travelled separately and the dependency of the child on the adult arose only after the arrival in the United Kingdom. I hope we are able to make progress on that particular point during the course of the Bill. I beg to move.

Lord McNally: My Lords, before the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns, sits down, could I ask her to clarify subsection (3)of her new Amendment No. A1? Is she suggesting that the Government carry the whole burden of the costs of this scheme? Does she have any idea of what those costs would be?

Baroness Anelay of St Johns: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, asks very relevant questions. One I can answer, the second can only be answered by the Government. The first is that it has been represented to me by the carriers that they do not anticipate that the Government would bear the whole cost of the provision of the data capture systems. I know the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is an expert in matters of data protection and data capture, so I am treading very warily in my answers here. But, as my noble friend Lord Bridgeman will go into more detail on April 20, our concern is that the Government have not yet worked out with the carriers the full system by which this will be implemented. For example, it has been put to me that for the airline procedures at Johannesburg—which comes top of the list of those countries from which people arrive

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undocumented—some form of digital camera could be provided at the final desk. There will be a camera at your check-in desk and a camera at the final desk before you actually enter the aircraft. That could then capture the documentation. Those cameras could be used by the airlines for other purposes, and anti-terrorism purposes. The difficulty is that, at the moment, neither the Government nor the carriers can hold up their hands and say exactly what the cost will be. As noble Lords who travel widely throughout the world will know, British Airways flights do not always exit through the same glass door, if I can put it as baldly as that. It may be that you are shuffled around particular parts of an airport. If the Government subsequently wish to extend the process to other airports, we may end up with a rather interesting situation, such as that put to me by Brittania Airways. There is one Greek island where the electricity is only turned on once a week so that the Britannia Airways aircraft can land. So we are talking of the unknown. I have given a long answer. I can promise the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that I have even more information, but that will test the Committee even further than that.

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