Heathrow Airport: Border Control Passenger Safety

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I join my noble friend in paying tribute to Heathrow, which has worked extremely hard, in a collaborative spirit, with the very difficult, challenging and often fast-changing border and quarantine arrangements. As she quite rightly says, its commitment to the red-list terminal pilot is extremely encouraging. However, I am afraid that I cannot give her the reassurance that she seeks on our mission to ensure that variants of concern that might have an impact on the vaccine will not be diligently and ruthlessly excluded from the country. It is our duty to protect the vaccine, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to do that.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

I draw the House’s attention to my relevant interests in the register. It seems to me that the current pandemic will pass but the future threat will not: mass air travel will return and, with it, so will the risk that, once again, it will become the principal vector by which a localised epidemic could become a global pandemic. Therefore, I ask the Minister: what action are the Government taking to find suitable technological solutions that provide early detection of airborne pathogens within aircraft in transit in order to then take measures to avoid the risk of mass cross-contamination in airport terminals? Who in government is the focal point for such activity?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord is right: this is a 21st-century problem that we may well be living with for the rest of our lives. It is absolutely right that we look at the best and latest technology to try to mitigate risk and reduce the impact on the things that we love doing, including global travel. However, the image that he cited is a little far away at the moment, I am afraid: we are struggling to get accurate tests from a gob of spit, let alone from the air in an airport cabin. However, we are meeting with the firms who are investigating these kinds of technologies; that is done through the innovations and partnerships department of test and trace, and we are hopeful that those technologies will emerge.