Home  The All New Blog Bureaucrats & Big Bangs
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Bureaucrats & Big Bangs |
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Written by Stephen Baines
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Monday, 02 October 2006 |
We’ve been working hard with bureaucracy over the last week or so.
Number one for me was dealing with cars – we have two major projects on this front, number one was to get my UK car registered in Sweden, number two was to get a Swedish car as a second car. The first one has had us mired in bureaucracy that I thought we’d escaped…
It should have been easy. The website said it was easy. As an EU car, all we needed to do, according to Vägverket, was bring it to Sweden, take it to Bilprovningen, pay 300 SEK, and hey presto! One Swedish registered car.
Oh no, no way was it going to be that easy… First Vägverket weren’t sure of their own rules and what was actually required. To register the car with Vägverket it needed to be tested at Bilprovningen. If it was tested at Bilprovningen its UK registration would end at that point, and then it wouldn’t be insured. Without insurance it can’t be registered with Vägverket. You can’t get insurance without it being registered at Vägverket, and you can’t get Swedish insurance without a Swedish registered car… Does anyone spot a problem here? Needless to say this is still a work in progress. We think there is a solution, but we’re not 100% sure at the moment.
So onto the second part of the plan, buy a Swedish car. We’ve been looking for a while, and now the expenses from the mileage driving to Sweden have been paid we finally could start looking properly. We found a VW Passat in Landskrona for sale, not a huge mileage on it, well maintained, and being sold due to the owners ill health. We went along, it seemed a great car for the money, and said we were interested but I needed to check the insurance price before saying definitely “yes”.
The next day I phoned up our insurer, as their website for some reason wouldn’t accept the car details. A puzzled girl tried at her end and got the same thing. Then she tried someone elses details, and it worked. It seemed that Vägverket hadn’t finished their fun with me, and had decided that I didn’t exist and therefore I couldn’t register the car or get insurance. This would apply to Car 1 also, so this had made everything twenty million times more difficult. How difficult could it be? Later on in the day, thankfully Vägverket and my insurers decided I did exist, and all was well. The insurance was amazingly cheap compared to UK prices. So we did the deal, and we’re now the proud owners of a 13 year old Passat.
The UK car? That’s still a work in progress.
The next one is even more bizarre. Lets put it this way, as EU citizens we are entitled to live anywhere in the EU. The Migrationsverket wrote to us last week denying us residence in Sweden. A bit of shock when you’ve bought a house, moved everything over, etc etc! One phone call to them and it turns out they’ve lost the paperwork for about 800 cases over the summer, and rather than write and ask for another copy of the missing paperwork individually, they decided to press the “reject button” on all the cases as that was automatically written, and wait for people to contact them and go “help!”.
Nice.
As for the bangs? We’ve had three days of very violent thunderstorms, usually with no rain. Last night at about 12:30am it sounded like the whole house was falling down so loud was the bang.
It wasn’t.
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