International Travel

Debate between Grant Shapps and Liam Fox

Thursday 8th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

I must caution the House and everybody listening that of course it is the case that, while opening up today and making these announcements, an amber list country could in theory switch to being a red list country. I can provide my hon. Friend no such guarantee that from July to October there may not be changes. There could be. None the less, I think most realise by this stage that the path of the coronavirus is unpredictable and I hope that this double vaccination measure provides some reassurance. It can change quickly and I want to reassure him that we will always act to the best benefit of people securing their health going forward.

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

I very much welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. Will he consider issuing separate guidance for business travellers who have multiple short visits abroad? It is self-evident that they cannot take a test three days before returning if they have only a one or two-day visit, so given that many business travellers will undertake such visits, will he issue that guidance? Can he also give a commitment to publish the criteria on which the decision to place a country on the green, amber or red list is taken? If the travel industry knew what the criteria were and the methodology, it would have an idea of the direction of travel rather than having sudden events and deadlines imposed upon it.

[Grant Shapps]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to mention the case of, for example, a business traveller who might go from A to B to C. One of the things that is little noticed is that a test is up to day 2—it is not a day 2 test per se. It might be helpful, though, if I were to write to him in more detail about the application and how that would work under this new system with regard to, for example, somebody travelling for business to many different places.

Finally, I am pleased to tell him that on the gov.uk website, the methodology for the Joint Biosecurity Centre is already set out. It does include subsections of a number of different criteria that apply. I often hear people say, “X country has fewer cases than we do, so why aren’t they on the green list?” The answer is probably that they are not sequencing their genome, they are not uploading it to the GISAID internationally recognised format, and perhaps they are not vaccinating people at quite the rate that we have. There are many different factors, but they are all set out by the JBC.