Some places in Eastern Norway have several months of waiting time to get a new passport.
In Oslo, people are queuing for hours in the hope of getting a drop-in time.
The situation is worst in Oslo and the Southeastern police district wrote VG newspaper. The head of the passport section in Oslo recognises the pattern.
‘’Annually, there is an increasing trend from just after the New Year, so this is a fairly fixed pattern’’ said Bekim Olomani. Normally you have to book an time when you need a passport, but four days a week, the passport office have drop-in hours.
‘’We find that the people are out early and queue from seven o’clock, and also earlier, some days.
There are a limited number of queues and they are used up very fast. One can risk the queue being already closed five minutes after we have opened.
At the police station in the capital there are no available hours for the next 60 days, and in some places in the Southeast police district, there are also no hours available until April. Police inspector Torill Sorte said the increase is usually not so great with them at this time of the year, but that rebuilding to bring in new passport kiosks is taking place.
‘’The rebuilding started just over Christmas, which should be a fairly quiet period, but we have received more applications than we had expected. We think people thought that one must be out early’’ she said.
© NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today
