International Travel

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I do not think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that virtually nobody in the House has done more than my hon. Friend to promote the case of the hard-pressed aviation sector during the last two years of the crisis. It is great news that Gatwick’s south terminal will reopen on 27 March; I very much hope to be there for that. I know that he shares my enthusiasm for all the work that carried on during the crisis to aim for jet zero, to help clean up the aviation sector and ensure that, by 2050, we have not only a booming British aviation sector but a cleaner one.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I am delighted that England is following Norway, Ireland, Hungary and several other countries in lifting all remaining travel restrictions. Will the Secretary of State assure me that when the public inquiry into covid happens, it will have full access to all the various and quite secretive committees that the Government relied on when they imposed those travel restrictions? Many of us believe, and growing evidence suggests, that for countries such as ours, which were never going to have a zero-covid strategy, the draconian travel restrictions did more harm than good.

[Grant Shapps]

For the sake of completeness, I will mention Ireland, Iceland, Lithuania, Norway and Slovenia, which have either removed or will shortly remove measures to put themselves in the same position. I say “of leading economies” because I am not aware of any other G7 economy that has gone as far as us in scrapping restrictions and making it easier to travel.

The inquiry will be there to learn the lessons from covid, and it is incredibly important that it does so not just in relation to travel but across everything that happened during covid. Of course, we want to learn the lessons because, without learning the lessons of the past, we can never improve things for the future.