Aviation, Travel and Tourism Industries

Karen Bradley Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Courts]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for raising that matter. We are considering what role vaccination may be able to play in facilitating international travel. I will refer to that again in due course.

The measures set out in the traffic-light system are not set in stone. That is also an answer to my right hon. Friend’s question. We are working towards a future travel system that can coexist with an endemic covid-19, and indeed recognising, as he has pointed out, the strong strategic rationale of the success of the vaccine programme. We are working to consider the role of vaccinations in shaping a different set of health and testing measures for inbound travel into our country. We will set out our position on that in due course.

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

The Minister has talked about the way the traffic-light system might work. We were promised that there would be a green watch list that would give travellers more time, but that simply was not used in the case of Portugal. Could he expand on that a little further?

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[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I would challenge the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) with Staffordshire Moorlands, which is equally if not more beautiful than anything he has described.

I rise to speak on behalf of the many tourism businesses in my constituency—in particular, my largest tourism business, Alton Towers. I have three points to make. First, the Government should be taking credit for and benefiting from the success of the vaccination. We should be celebrating the fact that we have the most successful vaccination programme in the G7. Over the past few days, I have enjoyed watching baseball in the United States of an evening. I watched the Cubs at the Padres a couple of days ago, and the Boston Red Sox, my team, at the New York Yankees. What I saw was a wonderful full stadium. I saw people sitting together with no social distancing, not wearing face masks, and enjoying the sport. I thought, what a wonderful example of celebrating the vaccine programme. I urge the Minister and the Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston), who is no longer here, to think what we can do to benefit in the same way that people in the United States are benefiting from the vaccine programme. I agree wholeheartedly with my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) —how can we be in a worse position this year than we were last year, when we did not have any vaccines? I will make the point again that I made in my intervention, which is that confidence in all of the tourism and travel sector relies on certainty. That means using the green watch list rather than just going straight to amber for travellers in Portugal, many of whom are constituents of mine who were very upset about that.

My second point is about what is essential. I was very pleased to hear the Minister say that this was an essential industry, because for too long we have been told that we can only do essential things. I had begun to worry that the Government seemed to think that life was not about anything more than eating, sleeping and possibly having the occasional glass of wine, which we were still able to do. Actually, life is about far more than that. It is about going to sports stadiums and watching our favourite team—even in the Euros, which are about to start this weekend. It is about riding rollercoasters at Alton Towers and about seeing loved ones, and it is really important that we stop thinking just of the bare essential.

That brings me to my final point, which is that when locations are allowed to reopen properly, please can they be allowed to reopen properly, not with restrictions? At Alton Towers, we queue outdoors—I am sure many of my colleagues have queued at Alton Towers. I can promise that Staffordshire weather is not always that good, but we queue outdoors, and that is the safest place to be. We need to make sure that venues such as Alton Towers can have maximum capacity. They also need to see the VAT cut extended, because they have been on the knees for far too long, and they desperately need it.