Do you have a reference for this? It might be true, but I live in a small European country and have never met or heard of anyone not having a passport, so it sounds very unlikely to me, though of cause we are a small percentage of the total, but is it really the case?
Most of my familly and friends i France do not have a passport.
Slide 53, Passport ownership.
These numbers are for people that already travelled internationally, before Brexit, so the total number might be much higher.
I was just _a_ source of passport ownership in the EU that I know of.
> "That's enormously important," says Tom Jenkins, who says that around three quarters of Europeans don't have passports, since they can travel around Europe with their ID cards.
Don't know how true this is though.