The Local spoke to Tove Dalenius, administrator of the Facebook group Svenskar i Storbritannien för bättre passhantering (Swedes in the UK for better handling of passports) to find out how this is affecting Swedish citizens living in the UK, and what expectations they have for Sweden's next government.
Two contributing factors
"There are two problems," Dalenius told The Local. "The main problem is that the embassy says that there are about 100,000 Swedish citizens living in the UK, and the Embassy in London only has the resources to make 7,000 passports a year, covering Swedes in the whole of the UK."
"Swedish passports only run for five years, so they have to be renewed very often. This process requires a special biometric machine. You have to attend a place that has this machine to get a new passport. In London, they have three of those machines. So that's 100,000 Swedes, for the three machines in London."
"So this means, if you divide these 100,000 Swedes by five - because everybody needs a passport every five years - about 13,000 Swedish citizens have to travel to Sweden or another country every year to get their passport, because they can't get them made in the UK."
This means that the Swedish Embassy in London only has the capacity to process around 35 percent of passport renewal applications per year.
This is also a conservative estimate, as it doesn't take into account the fact that passports for children under 12 need to be renewed even more often, as they expire after just three years.
The effect of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic
The UK's exit from the European Union has also put pressure on the passport system, as "settled status" - the residence status of Swedish citizens living in the UK without British citizenship - is tied to their Swedish ID.
This issue, which was already apparent before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, was further exacerbated by lockdowns and bans on travel between different parts of the UK, making it impossible for many Swedish citizens to make the trip to London to renew their passports.
"It's got worse," Dalenius said. "It was an issue before and it was raised before, but of course it's become more urgent now because more Swedes need passports for their settled status."
"So before, you could possibly live in the UK without a valid passport. But with a settled status if you're not also a British citizen, you need your Swedish passport."
"You can keep the settled status with an expired ID document, but this is not ideal. You have to show it to employers, you have to show it when you rent somewhere to live.”
'Communication issues' from the Swedish Embassy
Communications from the Swedish Embassy in London are also lacking, Dalenius said, meaning that a lot of Swedes in the UK don't realise how bad the issue actually is until they have to renew their passport and end up spending months, or even years, trying to book an appointment.
"After Covid - because for two years, we had lockdowns, and they were people who did not get their passport renewed. There's a backlog of people whose passports are running out in the UK, and they can't get a time at the embassy," she said.
"And the embassy don't necessarily advertise how few passports they make. So, many Swedish citizens who live in the UK are not aware that is so difficult to get a time at the embassy. They go on the website every week and look for times and they don't find one. And then they go on social media, they go 'oh, I can't get a time', and they try month after month or even years. They don't know that actually, the real chance of getting a time is very small. So there's a little bit of a communication issue there."
This also makes the issue even worse, as people's passports run out while they wait to get an appointment, meaning that they are unable to travel to Sweden or to an embassy in a different country in order to get their passport renewed there.
"So now, people have passports that have run out and they can't go to Sweden to get new ones because their passports have run out," Dalenius said.
This puts the system under even more pressure, as these people have apply for emergency, provisional passports in order to travel to Sweden to renew their standard passports, Dalenius said.
"So then, of course, the embassy gets bogged down. The Embassy also has to handle everybody whose passports have expired and then need another short term passport to go to Sweden."
Parents of Swedish children born abroad even worse off
Another factor affecting the parents of Swedish children born in the UK is the fact that Swedish children born abroad are not automatically assigned a personal number. Instead, their parents must apply for a coordination number or samordningsnummer on their behalf, which also requires a trip to the embassy.
This number is needed in order to apply for a child's passport, so parents are left in a situation where they have to not only secure a passport appointment, but also an appointment for their child's coordination number.
"To get a Swedish passport, these children need a samordningsnummer," Dalenius said. "And to get the samordningsnummer, you need an appointment at the embassy, and these appointments are even rarer than the passport appointments. The Swedish Embassy has the capacity to issue 1,000 of these in one year."
There's no way of knowing whether this is enough to cover demand, as there is no record of the number of Swedes under 18 living in the UK.
“Also nobody has any actual numbers on how many Swedish children or persons under 18 live in the UK. That’s an unknown number, which in itself is quite remarkable, that we do not have that information."
Moderate Party promises to Swedes abroad
The Svenskar i Storbritannien för bättre passhantering Facebook group, which provides information and campaigns for a better passport system, has already been in touch with outgoing foreign minister Ann Linde, and expects results from the incoming Moderate-led government, following election messaging sent out by leader Ulf Kristersson during the election campaign.
Recent elections have shown that the votes of Swedes abroad – which are counted at a later date and often referred to as "Wednesday votes" – can swing elections. Overseas votes also tend to skew towards the Moderates.
In a message directed to Swedes abroad on July 13th this year, Kristersson wrote that "every Swedish citizen, no matter whether you live in Sweden or abroad, should be able to renew their passport without queues and hassle."
"If he is voted in as the new prime minister," Dalenius said, speaking before Kristersson's prime ministerial vote on October 17th, "I want to know, how are they going to solve this issue in the UK?"
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