Northern Ireland: Flight Passengers and Covid-19

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I am enormously grateful to the Irish Government for the very large amount of informal clinical data-sharing that goes on. CMOs of both countries exchange data on such matters as VOCs the whole time, and that kind of day-to-day clinical exchange of on-the-ground information works extremely well. The specific question of travel information is a lacuna that needs to be closed, I recognise that it needs to be shut, a lot of work is going on to shut it and I am grateful to those involved.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I think noble Lords understand that there have to be special arrangements, and the common travel area seems to work well for most things. The Minister knows that I have asked him repeatedly about the joining up of data of international travellers between whichever border they arrive at, the NHS and the testing system, especially the private testing system, otherwise any self-isolation system will fail. Can the Minister say whether this gap that there was before has now been remedied, so that every part of the NHS can pick up data information from borders, and how it works across all four UK countries? Will he explain a bit more about the CTA arrangements between Westminster, Stormont and the Republic?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I reassure the noble Baroness that the data flows between borders, Test and Trace, NHS and JBC work extremely well. I was in the Covid Gold meeting earlier today and we had presentations that captured all the data flows from all those places, and we have extremely good see-through on VOCs, infection rates and bed occupancy. The progress we have made on that area is astounding. Where we have a lacuna is on the transfer of data from Irish travellers to Northern Ireland, and that is something we are working to close.