Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (England) (Amendment) (No. 7) Regulations 2021

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Monday 22nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I add my welcome to the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and I enjoyed her speech. We know that our failure to secure our borders at the start of this pandemic led to considerable numbers of tourists coming back from their skiing holidays—in Italy in particular but also elsewhere—and not isolating. Those tourists, I would say, substantially led to the soaring Covid numbers a year ago. We now have a list of 33 countries on the red-list travel ban, which reads a bit like a list of developing nations. Again, surely the greatest risk is from people returning from our neighbouring countries in Europe such as France and Germany, where, as I understand it, the South African variant is taking hold. Are the Government urgently considering including our European neighbours on the red list to avoid repeating our mistakes of a year ago or, indeed, going rather further as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, and others have suggested? It seems to me that, if we want to lead a more normal life through the summer and onwards, securing our borders much more effectively than this regulation will do is going to be absolutely critical. I look forward to the Minister’s response to that point.