COVID-19 Variant: Travel Guidance for Local Authorities

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Wednesday 26th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

We have not banned smoking; lots of smoking is going on among the British public.

This is where the public have a role to play. They have agency, they are able to make their own decisions and they can make the sensible distinction between meeting inside when they could be meeting outside and making unavoidable decisions of the kind the noble Baroness alluded to.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

I will have a go now. The latest advice to people in these areas is to minimise travel and use their common sense. If a family have booked a trip away for the weekend, how would the Minister advise them?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I would ask them to use their common sense. I am a parliamentarian; I am not telling them or legislating for them on that particular decision. They can see the rising infection rates around them, they know for themselves how this disease spreads and we are asking them to make a sensible, reasonable, common-sense decision about whether that journey is necessary. That is not something we are legislating for, it is what we are putting in guidelines, and I think that that, at this stage of the pandemic, is a reasonable response.