The health risk simply does not justify the major costs and uncertainty endured by travellers
Early this summer saw most legal Covid restrictions removed across the UK. Following so much hardship and disruption to businesses and family life, the vaccine rollout has seen Covid-related deaths reduced hugely compared to previous waves of the virus, and the link between infections and hospitalisations weakened even in the face of the delta variant, now dominant across most of the globe.
This has allowed our domestic economy to reopen, with nightclubs, football stadia, cafes, shops and restaurants all open for as much dancing, cheering, eating, drinking and shopping as the heart desires, a fact to be celebrated. It is also the reason furlough support is being withdrawn this month for UK businesses, recognising that many constraints on trading have been removed. In short, we are learning to live with a virus that as much as we wish it would, will not just go away.
There is one increasingly glaring omission to this progress – and that’s international travel, on which my own and many other communities around the country depend. International travel is, in contrast to the rest of the economy, still struggling to recover in the face of restrictions, complexity and a dysfunctional and costly testing system that is so bad that the Competition and Markets Authority has been asked to investigate it.
In short, international travel is still mid-crisis, even as economic support is taken away. For would-be travellers, the reality is that many remain cut off from family and friends due to cost and more still with travel bookings are forced to anxiously await the next seemingly arbitrary decisions on individual country restrictions.
These ongoing restrictions imposed by the UK on travel increasingly make little sense, especially in the months since Freedom Day. There is no evidence that international travel from most countries poses a risk to the UK in terms of importing infections (above and beyond what we are accepting at a community level already), nor evidence that travel from most countries is a route for dangerous variants into the country.
This has been recognised by most of our neighbours, where in Europe they have moved to a pragmatic and risk-based scheme that allows quarantine-free travel for the fully vaccinated without the need for expensive pre-departure and post-arrival testing like here in the UK, but retain a small red list to guard against variants. Germany in fact now does not have any countries on its equivalent red list at all, assessing that there are no variants currently worse than delta – the one we already have. What is more, only a small minority of even positive tests from arrivals into the UK are actually being checked to see if they are a variant of concern. The actual health risk, and how the system is being used, simply do not justify the major costs and uncertainty endured by travellers.
The pragmatic approach of our continental friends is saving European travellers and holidaymakers hundreds of Euros compared to Brits, usually without any obvious health advantage given Covid rates across the continent are usually lower than our own. It has also meant that the recovery in air travel across Europe has happened much faster than here in the UK.
US travellers are not travelling to London – they are going to Rome instead. Spanish beaches are not full of Brits – rather, it is Dutch, French and Germans who are occupying the loungers.
Why does this matter? Like many airport constituencies, thousands of my constituents are reliant on the aviation sector for their livelihoods – over 500,000 across the country. The end of furlough coincides with the end of the peak summer season, which together with the Government’s over-cautious approach, is sowing the seeds of a “perfect storm” for those working in the UK’s aviation and travel sector, who are now looking nervously towards the winter, fearful that their jobs will be irrevocably lost overseas or to a European hub.
The last “checkpoint” review by the Government on the travel rules is expected within weeks. If we do not urgently remedy our outlier status by getting rid of rip-off testing rules and dropping unnecessary and disproportionate restrictions for what is surely low-risk travel, our once world-leading aviation sector risks dwindling, meaning fewer jobs, fewer opportunities to travel and do business, and a poorer, more isolated country than before. This really is the last opportunity to rescue the UK’s travel sector from a precipice.
This first appeared in the Daily Telegraph on September 7th 2021