Why does Denmark renew passports faster than Sweden and Norway?
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Loading... - Sussane Poulsen
- 06 Apr 2022
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Despite several attempts by police authorities in Sweden to reduce the waiting times for new passports, Swedish nationals in several parts of the Scandinavian country must wait for months in some cases before their application is processed.
The county (län) authority in Stockholm does not have available appointments for passport processing until October, for example, Swedish news wire TT wrote this week.
With pandemic restrictions severely limiting travel through much of 2020 and 2021, many people did not bother to renew their passports as they expired.
As a result, local police passport centres are now having to handle a large backlog of applications, at the same time as the usual applications from people whose passports are expiring this year.
“Partly it’s because we’re about to go into high season, and partly it’s because people have not renewed their passports during the pandemic, but have waited until restrictions have been lifted,” Linda Ahlén, chief of the unit which handles passports in the Swedish police, told the TT newswire in February.
In Norway, passport applications are also handled regionally by police, with waiting times dependent on appointment availability.
The appointment system for Oslo shows the next available appointment slot as being in August. According to TT, a Norwegian police estimate has stated that the waiting times are between one and three months, depending on where in the country the applicant lives.
Meanwhile, the company which manufactures Norwegian passports, Thales, is facing government scrutiny over delivery delays on new passports and ID cards. Thales also manufactures passports for both Sweden and Finland.
A global shortage of raw materials due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine is related to the delays, the Norwegian Police Directorate said last month.
Norway has also seen a bottleneck in applications resulting from passports expiring during the pandemic, but the holders not renewing them because they could not travel.
Extended opening times for appointments and hiring of extra staff are amongst measures being taken in Norway to alleviate the issue.
Finland is also seeing congested ID card and passport services, with waiting times for appointments up to around eight weeks according to TT.
This is despite rules in Finland allowing some passport holders to renew their documents without physically attending appointments, for example if they submitted biometric data for their previous passport within the last six years.
“Right now there are many who have not renewed their passports as usual and we do not have enough available appointments,” Hanna Piipponen, head of passport administration with the Finnish police, told TT.
As many as 500,000 people in Finland are reported to be without a passport currently according to TT, with almost as many, 450,000 in the same situation in Norway.
Denmark, however, is not experiencing the same processing and production issues as its neighbours, with people in Copenhagen waiting as little as one or two days to receive new passports.
Municipalities, rather than the police, are responsible for processing new passports in Denmark. That difference is largely credited for the country’s favourable record when it comes to waiting times for renewals.
“It is not complicated to issue a passport and it’s good to have this close to the other citizens’ service,” Jette Bondo, office manager with Copenhagen Municipality’s Borgerservice (Citizens’ Service), told TT.
Danish passports are also valid for longer than Swedish and Finnish ones, with a ten-year expiry on Danish passports compared to five years for Swedes and Finns. Norwegian passports are valid for 10 years. Read More...
