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Home Office

Answer

Ms Oona King: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many (a) passports and (b) identity documents purported to be issued by an EU member state presented by passengers on arrival in the UK were the subject of inquiries with the authorities of the member state to determine the document's genuineness and that issue to the holder was correct, during 1999. [137290] Mrs. Roche: Statistics are not currently compiled for the number of inquiries made with other European Union/ European Economic Area (EU/EEA) member states regarding documents issued by them. The Immigration Service National Forgery Section is the nominated United Kingdom contact point for EU/EEA travel document inquiries. Other Immigration Service offices, however, also make certain unilateral inquiries directly with EU member states via established bilateral liaison contacts. Reference is normally made to these authorities only in a restricted number of cases; for instance, when it cannot be determined that the document is a forgery, or to clarify whether or not a document is a stolen blank whose details have not already been circulated via the nominated national contact point. A new system of recording details of the mutual exchange of such information is currently being put in place. Comprehensive figures are, however, available for the number of cases of fraudulent passports and identity cards detected by the Immigration Service at United Kingdom ports of arrival during the course of 1999. There were 5,516 such detections, 3,018 of which were non-British EEA documents.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

356 c543W; 137290

Session

1999-00

Subjects

Fraud EU countries Identity cards Forgery EU nationals Passports Overseas visitors

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk