Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what discussions he has had with UEFA on travel restrictions for overseas visitors to the UK for the European Football Championship.

In general, international visitors are subject to our current border restrictions and were not exempt from quarantining if they had a ticket for any Euro 2020 games being hosted in the UK. We did, via UEFA, communicate to all international ticket-holders on the nature of our border restrictions, and saw that most of those based overseas who originally purchased tickets latterly chose not to come here, with many transferring them to people in the UK.

The government and UEFA announced on 22 June that the semi finals and the final would be hosted at up to 75% capacity. We agreed with UEFA that all additional tickets sold by them for these matches would be limited to those based in the Common Travel Area

A limited number of accredited guests were provided an exemption from COVID-19 borders restrictions to attend the latter stages of the Championships. This ensured that the tournament could take place successfully in the UK. They were either:

a) only permitted to leave isolation for official events, including matches or UEFA meetings, subject to strict public health mitigations, developed with the input of Public Health England and in line with other international events such as the G7; or

b) required to travel directly from the airport to the stadium, and back again, helping to prevent contact with the local population.