Identity Documents Bill

I am grateful for that hair-splitting point. My passport remains the property of the state, but the plain fact is that I and 11,000 others paid £30. That is not a lot of money, but it was paid in good faith. New clause 2, gently and in a friendly way—there will be other opportunities to make similar points—says that there should be polite compensation. That is a long-established principle of British democratic practice. We are talking peanuts, so the Government would do themselves no harm at all if they erred gently on the side of generosity.