There is anger about the case of Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old retired nurse who has lived in Sweden for 21 years. Her husband died there; her son, grandchildren and home are there. Yet she has been told to leave because her post-Brexit residence application was late. Her case is appalling and predictable – but far from isolated.

The Guardian has also reported on the plight of Horace Mason, 74, who faces being deported after a court ruling, despite having lived in Sweden for 25 years. This is sad but not surprising.

When Sweden set out its plans in 2020, we at the Brits in Sweden campaign warned in an official submission that the application scheme could strip vulnerable people of their rights if they missed the deadline. We urged a flexible and generous approach, and later raised concerns about outreach and refusals with the UK government and European Commission. We have watched Britons fall off that cliff edge since 2021; only occasionally does a case reach the media.

The new scheme gave British residents safeguards under free-movement law – including assistance, reasonable grounds for lateness and proportionality – that were untested.

We were not alone. The Swedish Bar Association said the new rules must be applied generously to both evidence and deadlines, to which the government insisted that the authorities already had sufficient flexibility.

The truth of the situation is now clear, for the statistics only point in one direction. Almost 4,000 of 14,200 applications in Sweden have been refused. The UK Foreign Office calculates a 27.5% refusal rate – three times that of any other member state and far above the EU average of 3–4%. Eurostat records 2,500 British nationals have been ordered to leave Sweden since 2021, about a third of the EU total.

Reporting differences complicate detailed comparisons, but the statistics show a red flag consistent with lived experience. Kathleen Poole had advanced Alzheimer’s when Sweden tried to remove her in 2023. Nichola Stanlick arrived aged seven, 40 years ago, and applied on time, yet was refused withdrawal agreement protection and given a national permit expiring in 2027. Kenny Solomons, the husband of a Swedish singer, was forced to leave and would have to qualify under national law to return as a resident.

Data on genuine missed-deadline applications remains opaque. Earlier figures mixed them with legitimate later applicants, including people joining family members and those seeking permanent status. After we raised this with Whitehall, the UK challenged the data and Sweden no longer show it in EU reports. Among genuine missed-deadline cases brought to our 9,000-member group, we cannot verify one in which Sweden accepted the reasons for applying late.

The Brexit treaty called for an awareness campaign, but unlike Denmark and the Netherlands, the Swedish government chose not to contact registered Britons individually. Some people who enquired to Swedish authorities were told they need do nothing; official information did not always say that this meant “not yet”. Older people and those without computers were easily missed.

The then director general of the Swedish Migration Agency stated that he believed contacting registered Britons individually would not have made a difference. This is difficult to reconcile with the evidence base.

The problem is not confined to those who submitted late applications. Sweden sometimes refused withdrawal agreement status but granted temporary national permits. That merely kicks the can down the road. As those permits expire, some people cannot meet newer permanent-residence requirements, or no longer have the family circumstances on which their permits depended.

So why Sweden, and why now? The answer is that Sweden’s migration politics have moved sharply towards restriction. That cannot displace EU law, but it makes remedial action harder to defend politically. A Swedish faith in neutral rules and independent agencies can also mistake procedural uniformity for justice when radically different human circumstances are reduced to data points.

Britons in the EU are caught in a political perfect storm. EU citizens in Britain have a constituency and dedicated monitoring authority, whereas Britons are divided among 27 systems. Brexit created the problem, but did not require Sweden to conduct inadequate outreach, obscure statistics or stretch proportionality.

We are stuck in a very difficult middle: Brexiters resist admitting that Brexit created these problems, while some remainers resist criticising an EU member state. Both, in their relative positions, abandon the people the agreement protects.

In the Whitehall satire Yes, Prime Minister, the official response to a foreign problem progresses from “nothing is going to happen”, to “maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do”, and finally to “maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now”. The UK government and commission must intervene before reaching that final stage. Sweden should pause disputed removals, publish reliable cohort statistics and submit the scheme to independent review before more lives are irreversibly uprooted.

• David Milstead is a British-Swedish volunteer citizens’ rights campaigner, working through the Brits in Sweden group