Since January 2022, when he, entirely without realising it, had lost his right to live and work in Sweden, he had continued working as head chef at two restaurants at Stockholm's Gröna Lund amusement park, paying taxes, and looking after his two children.
"I was living in a bubble," he shrugs when asked how he possibly could have missed something so momentous as Brexit. "I live in a Swedish world. I speak Swedish. I work in Swedish. I talk Swedish with my kids. It just kind of washed over my head, and I didn't think about it, and I didn't think of what the outcome would be."
Watkins is at risk of being the latest British citizen to be deported from Sweden as a result of either a late application for post-Brexit residency or a failure to meet Sweden's strict interpretation of the requirements for post-Brexit residency.
According to Eurostat, Sweden has issued deportation orders to 2,500 British nationals since 2021, a third of the total number of Brits ordered to leave across the EU. The UK Foreign Office calculates fully 27.5 percent of Britons in Sweden were refused post-Brexit residency, compared to an EU average of under 4 percent.
Another British citizen, who runs a Facebook Group for British long-term residents of Sweden who, like her, have been denied post-Brexit residency, suspects there are many more British citizens Watkins who have managed to continue living and working in Sweden for years without discovering that they have lost their right to reside in the country.
"I suspect there are more, although I don't honestly know how they have navigated Swedish digital hurdles so long and are only now discovering they are 'illegal'," she says.
Watkins has been living in Sweden for over 20 years, moving over after meeting his Swedish wife at a restaurant he worked in back home in Bristol, UK. In that time, he has worked his way up from being a line chef at Gröna Lund to running Tyrol, the park's most upmarket restaurant.
He only realised the trouble he was in when he took a rare trip back to the UK and was stopped at Copenhagen Airport and asked for a residency permit card.
"I froze at that point. I had no idea and she could quite clearly see that on my face. She was kind of cocky, because she said to me, 'Oh, so you've been living in Sweden for 20 years, and you didn't know you needed a residency permit?' Actually, no, I didn't."
The border guard called over an officer who stamped his passport. "He said, if you have any problems coming back into Denmark, just show this stamp, and you'll be allowed to go on your way back to Stockholm, so that was basically where it all started."
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When he got back he contacted the Migration Agency, eventually speaking to an official on the phone.
"She said, 'wait, you've been working?' I said, 'well, of course, why wouldn't I be working?' 'Oh, but you're not supposed to be working because you don't have a residency permit'." I said, 'well, this is why I'm contacting you because I didn't receive any of this information. And it just sort of went downhill after that'."
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Watkins made a late application for post-Brexit residency and three months later was told he was allowed to stay in Sweden and continue working while the application was processed. When the application was rejected two months later, he applied for a spouse permit, deciding to apply from within Sweden despite the risk he might be rejected for not applying from outside the country.
The human resources department from Gröna Lund then got involved and were soon told that he had lost the right to work in Sweden.
"So there and then, after 15 years of working for the same company, I lost my job, and that's also where everything started to really crash."
He soon discovered that as well as losing his job he had also lost the right to unemployment payments from the A-kassa insurance fund he had been paying into for 20 years, as to qualify he needed to show he was registered with the Swedish Public Employment Service and looking for work, and he couldn't do this as he no longer had the legal right to work in Sweden.
He also had no right to payments from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. "Everything was taken away at that point," he says.
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Even though the Migration Agency warned him that if he applied for a spouse permit from Sweden he would be going against one of the agency's general rules, meaning his application would only be accepted if he could show he had justifiable reasons, he felt he was not in a position to leave the country.
"Of course I chose to stay in Sweden," he says. "I have two small children, so I can't just pack up and leave, and hope for the best that my partner is is going to be able to handle life without me. That's kind of where I am today. I'm sitting here still waiting on my decision nine months later."
For someone used to high-paced kitchen work, Gavin says he has been struggling with the enforced period of unemployment, and his children and wife notice the change.
"It's hard for them knowing that their pappa, who is an active person who loves to work, doesn't get to do the things he normally does and they see that I'm sad," he says.
"It's tough, especially for my partner. In terms of the children's schedule, everything's on me, which is OK, but of course, everything financial is on Victoria, and that's really tough: a family of four living off one income is insane."
Gavin is well aware that many people, both British and Swedish, will see him as to blame and argue that it was his responsibility to stay informed about Brexit, but he believes the Swedish and British governments also had a responsibility to reach out to people like him, who were deeply embedded in Swedish life and who lived largely offline.
"I think it's crazy," he says. "It was a part of the agreement that they're were supposed to reach out to British citizens so they got the right information at the right time. But I can say a hundred percent from my heart that I didn't receive any information, because I wouldn't be sitting here today if that were the case."
After The Local spoke to Watkins, he was finally awarded a case officer, who then phoned him and advised him to renew his British passport so he can be granted a full-length residency permit. The case officer would not comment on whether this meant the Migration Agency had decided to grant him residency.
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