International Travel

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Businesses across the travel industry have been drawing on the £350 billion-worth of grants and loans, VAT deferrals, the furlough scheme and much else besides. The best thing we can do is get the country flying again and get people moving again. Our exemplary progress with the vaccination roll-out gives us the best opportunity of that happening sooner rather than later.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

As the vaccine rolls out and as international travel increases, if we are to prevent new variants from sending us back to square one, there needs to be an effective surveillance system with transparent analysis built in so that there can be swift action. We do not have that effective system at the moment, as we have seen from the fact that the delta variant has whipped around the country and is now closing schools and preventing UK residents from travelling abroad because people do not want it to spread. We must improve that system and not be in a situation whereby so many cases can arrive in a country before preventive measures are taken. Will the Secretary of State agree, as part of improving that system, to finally start publishing the Joint Biosecurity Centre’s analyses—not just the arrivals data, but the analyses of what is happening in other countries? The Scientific Group for Emergencies papers are published. We have been calling for the Joint Biosecurity Centre’s papers to be published for almost a year. Please publish them now. What has the Secretary of State got to hide?

[Grant Shapps]

The right hon. Lady is absolutely right about the need to prevent the variants. Our surveillance system, which involves our sequencing the genome more than any other country in the world, as I know she appreciates, is a big part of that. We frequently find that we know about overseas variants before the host country and consequently we often tell them about it first.

I want to ensure that the record of the House is entirely accurate. I talked about the risk assessment methodology that is already published online. The methodology includes variant assessment, triage, risk assessment and outcomes, which inform ministerial decisions. Under each heading, there is tremendous detail. For example, triage includes testing rates per 100,000, weekly instances, test positivity, evidence of overseas variants under investigation and much else. Then we publish the data on both the Public Health England and the JBC websites. I invite the right hon. Lady to look at that data. I think she will also appreciate that there are times when, for diplomatic reasons, it would be difficult to publish other countries’ data before they have done so. However, she will find a wealth of information, which we are already publishing, on the JBC and PHE websites.