Covid-Secure Borders

Jerome Mayhew Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con) [V]]

We have a number of weapons with which to fight covid. The key one is the vaccine programme, on which even Labour is struggling to criticise the Government’s performance. There is an additional weapon, which is the control of our borders, to minimise the importation of additional infection and new variants from elsewhere.

What is the right policy to apply to international travel in the midst of a pandemic? A knee-jerk reaction would be to close our borders, and to sound tough on covid. Labour now talks of a ring of steel, but sensible Government need to recognise that no modern trading country can totally prevent new covid variants from crossing borders. Even a country as geographically remote as Australia, which does not rely on thousands of border crossings every day for the supply of food, has not been able to keep the delta variant out.

As for the United Kingdom, 38% of all of our food is imported every day—much of it in the bellies of passenger airliners, let us not forget—and that is just a single example of our absolute need to continue international travel. What we can do is slow down the arrival of new variants and the spread from countries with higher infection rates by prohibiting all travel to the highest risk countries, by limiting international travel to high-priority activities for the medium-risk countries, by quarantining new arrivals from at-risk countries and by aggressive test and trace, including surge testing when new outbreaks emerge. I break off to take this opportunity specifically to pay tribute to NHS Test and Trace. This is an organisation that is habitually traduced as an article of faith by Labour, but which is in fact a highly effective operation that has saved many lives.

All these actions by the Government have bought us time—time that allows our vaccination programme to get to a level that provides us all with an effective defence so that we can truly live with covid. As we were reminded just yesterday, we are tantalisingly close to achieving this milestone, but not quite yet. There is a criticism of the Government implicit in this motion that they were late in imposing travel restrictions to India in response to the emergence of the delta variant, but despite the protestations of the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), this really is just another shameless example of Labour hindsight hard at work.

As the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) admitted in her speech, it was the emergence of the delta variant, not India’s pre-variant infection rates, that changed the risk profile of travel, yet the Government placed India on the red list two weeks before the delta variant was identified as a variant of concern. In fact, it was six days before it was even deemed a variant of interest. The Labour fox is truly shot on that very important issue.

The UK does have a strong policy of restrictions at the border and remains vigilant to new variants, but it is a complicated, nuanced issue. We cannot just sound tougher on borders—it will have huge complicating and unintended consequences. I fail to understand Labour’s call for the removal of the amber list, other than that it is some kind of attempt to politicise public health messages. The traffic light system is a sensible approach, and amber covers countries where the risk of some travel with caution can be accepted if the benefit of that travel is high. It is a classic risk analysis—the risk of an event happening and its severity, and mitigation to reduce that risk to an acceptable level. In business, we do it all the time.

To remove this classification would be to prohibit important business and humanitarian travel to amber list countries without supporting data, putting at risk even more aviation and travel jobs. I suppose it would be called collateral damage. This should not be an issue for party manoeuvres. We should not be trying to out-tough each other in areas such as this. Labour should be working with the Government in the national interest to drive home simple travel messages. I am surprised and very disappointed that it is not.