Passport officer alerts about exhaustion – DN.SE

A loud cry of children cuts through the murmur in the long, narrow passport office in Rinkeby in western Stockholm. The staff who have a commitment to issue 25 passes per person per day now do about 50-60 at the same time. Fingers clatter on keyboards in stuffy pass booths where headaches have become a normal condition. Not infrequently, the staff also become targets for the annoyance of the queuing.

– The other day, a man refused to leave the facility if he was not allowed to do a pass, then we had to call for reinforcements. We are constantly at the top of our capacity and some days there is only one shortage, says Fanny Wikander, group manager at the passport office in Rinkeby, Järva.

Almost four months have passed since the passport office’s workload soared. In March, the police set up a special staff to solve the urgently growing passport queues. The efforts that have been made so far focus on new recruitment, retraining, and extended opening hours. Each region is responsible for ensuring a safe working environment in connection with the adjustments to the passport offices, but the work is kept together nationally.

– I understand that the situation creates upset feelings, but the background to the difficulties is simply a two-year pandemic. We did not expect the restrictions to be lifted overnight, but thought it would happen gradually. Then it instead exploded completely around the sports holiday, says the police’s deputy chief of staff Magnus Roglert, and adds:

– With the results in hand, we would of course have taken height so that this could happen. On the other hand, pass prices would have risen enormously if we had created overcapacity instead.

The stress at Rinkeby’s passport office has led to the staff making more mistakes. This involves everything from charging too little for the passports to accidentally sending them to the wrong collection point. Passport administrators also need to address the dilemma that the more passports they issue during the extended opening hours, the longer the queue time will be to produce the coveted booklet.

– The waiting time to collect the passport is now eight weeks instead of the usual five working days. It’s hard to find a scapegoat here. But it is clear that the public perceived the police as contradictory when the information they received last year was “do not travel if you do not have to, but feel free to go and do your passport”.

Katarina Åhlén and Fanny Wikander wishes there was a greater understanding from the public about what passport making really is.

– It’s not just about taking a picture and printing in some personal information. We must work legally to avoid the risk of a passport ending up in the wrong hands, says Katarina Åhlén and tells of incidents where children have been taken out of the country, after passport officers have failed to request consent for passports from both children’s guardians.

Lena Amorøe is the police’s national chief safety representative. She receives the entire country’s deviation reports, where the Stockholm and Malmö regions stand out in number. But the workload is felt in all of Sweden’s 108 passport offices. Several administrators testify that the greatest stress is psychosocial.

– Annoyed visitors and congestion are major work environment problems in themselves. But most of all, the staff is worried about making mistakes at work. This is because under rather messy conditions they have to present the important document of value that a passport actually is, says Lena Amorøe.

Also in the police region in the middle the load is greatest in the main towns, but according to the region’s chief safety representative Fredrik Hagelin, employees in the entire police area have flagged for a pressured situation in the workplaces.

– Some have felt so bad about stress that they have had to take sick leave. The system is simply not built for these volumes, he says.

– It is easy to sit on a national level and hatch ideas on how to meet the demand for passports, but in reality there are not enough staff to cover the extended opening hours. This has led to employees being ordered overtime instead.

The load is one problems in all of the police’s seven regions, even though region north seems to have a slightly lighter workload.

– It is not an emergency situation here right now but there are many inexperienced people who are recruited for the passport processing, it becomes vulnerable when they have a lot left to learn. There is a great risk that this will eventually lead to burnt out personnel, says Peter Burman, chief safety representative for the police in the northern region.

Charlotta Göransson is Deputy Chief of Staff for work with passports in the police region south, which is one of the country’s most congested areas. She confirms that the situation is strained. Not least after the passport officers started working in two shifts.

– We feel that the employees have been anxious to help and solve this problem, but that it is also difficult to get privacy together.

On the question of the efforts was put in too late, she replies that it was not possible to predict how much demand from the public would be.

– The best thing would have been if the police had not had to establish a special event at all, because it is resource-intensive in itself. We understood early on that we would need to hire new employees before the restrictions were released, but not the scope, she says.

However, the national chief safety representative Lena Amorøe feels that Swedish passport management is a structural problem and that preparedness should have been reviewed much earlier.

– Now we see the consequences of letting passport officers go during the pandemic instead of thinking long-term. There were analyzes of how many citizens would ask for a passport when the pandemic ended.

– They did not take those figures seriously and they did not take height, but waited until the last minute to establish a contingency. That’s why staff are putting out fires now.

She’s worried about which ones long-term effects the situation will have on the everyday work of the police.

– When the police are to recruit more people, we now need to invest large resources in passport officers instead of new police officers and investigators. This type of crisis thus affects the entire authority and society, not just individual citizens who do not receive their passports on time.

Several of the newly appointed passport officers at the passport office in Rinkeby have been ordered there from their regular workplaces. Fanny Wikander thinks that the work motivation in the work team is good, despite the fact that there is not yet a completely certain forecast for how long the changeover can last.

– The administrators do a fantastic job and toil like animals. I’m very proud of them. Those who do not have the conditions to work in the evenings walk around and have a bad conscience for it, and those who work overtime can barely manage to spend time with their families. We bite together, because the harder we work, the faster we can return to normal, she says.

The passport officer Katarina Åhlén are single with their children. During the spring, her sister flew to Stockholm from Gothenburg to be a babysitter.

– For a period, I worked extra every Saturday. Finally, the children asked “will you work six days a week right now mom?”. It feels tough of course, but I try to remind myself that the workload is not forever.

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