Exclusive: Britain's lost passports

According to the UK’s Identity and Passport Service, more than 10,000 passports a year are ‘thrown out with rubbish’, it has been reported. Thanks to leaked documents found in a skip round the back of the IPS offices, we can now exclusively reveal the destination of Britain’s other missing passports.

The following list comes complete with a disclaimer that some people are just plain stupid, quite possibly leaving the United Kingdom an international laughing stock. Certain government decisions, however, already achieved this long ago, so we have no qualms reprinting the document verbatim.

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To: Identity and Passport Service

Subject: Destinations of lost passports 2010-11

*Highly Classified – burn after reading*†

• 400+ lost down the back of the sofa. One such passport from 1921 recently retrieved and sold on internet auction site for in excess of £3,000.
• 300 destroyed after being mistaken as counterfeit due to ugliness of photograph or silliness of name.
• 250+ sold on markets and boot sales as children’s colouring books, scrapbooks, bookmarks and dust covers.
• 200 shredded and used as confetti at bogus weddings.
• 200 donated to charity shops bundled with copies of Mills and Boon, Catherine Cookson and Dan Brown novels, which, under national law, must be incinerated immediately.
• 150+ used as doorstops, beer mats and table wedges.
• 50 consumed as food, fed to pet fish or liquidised as part of protein shakes.
• 20 flushed down toilet or buried in back garden after being presumed deceased.
• 10 stuffed into coin slots of vending machines.
• 10 retained by national newspapers in order to bribe high-ranking officials, a fact that cannot be reported due to a super-injunction taken out by Rupert Murdoch.
• 5 placed in skips at the back of the IPS office.

*The preceding information is for the attention of IPS officials only. If you are not an employee of the Identity and Passport Service, please erase your memory and/or report to your nearest police station for reconditioning.*

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This just in: the UK Identity and Passport Service have responded to this article, stating they will ‘relocate their waste disposal area to the first floor of their office in the interests of national security’. I bet they wish they’d just invested in a shredder.

† Please refrain from burning your computer monitor, as there is absolutely no danger of the IPS tracking your internet activity.

Passport image: Edward Hands (CCASA2.5).