Shapps: Travel dependent on vaccination here and elsewhere
James ChappleTransport secretary Grant Shapps has said other countries will need to catch up with the UK’s vaccination programme before the government can start to "unlock" international travel.
Shapps told BBC Breakfast on Wednesday (10 February) a resumption of travel would be firstly dependent on the UK’s vaccination effort continuing apace and filtering down to lower age groups.
He reiterated prime minister Boris Johnson would on 22 February set out a roadmap out of the current Covid lockdown, which he said would be heavily conditional.
"It will be, ‘if this happens and cases are coming down and if we see deaths reducing further and so on and so forth and the vaccination programme is running as planned’, then we’ll set out a series of dates to start the unlock from this lockdown," said Shapps.
Pressed specifically on travel, Shapps said he couldn’t give a definitive answer. "It depends on both the level of vaccination here and, critically, elsewhere," said the transport secretary.
"We’ll need to wait for other countries to catch up as well in order to be able to do that wider international unlock as we can only control the situation here."
Speaking to Sky News, Shapps said he didn’t want to "unnecessarily raise people’s hopes". I’m afraid I can’t give a definitive [on] will there or will there not be the opportunity to take holidays this next year, either at home or abroad.
"I don’t know what the situation will be by the middle of the summer. Nobody can tell from the point that we sit right now."
Shapps also defended the tough fines outlined on Tuesday (9 February) by health secretary Matt Hancock of up to £10,000 for non-compliance with new testing and quarantine rules, and jail sentences of up to 10 years for efforts to conceal travel to one of the government’s 33 "red list" countries from which travellers to the UK must complete 10 days’ mandatory hotel quarantine.
"We do absolutely need to make sure we have all the defences up against variants of the [Covid-19] virus, particularly now – we don’t want to lose at the last stage when we’re doing so well with the vaccination programme," Shapps told the BBC.
On the up to 10-year prison terms, Shapps added: "It’s a tariff. I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by [being] deliberately misleading and saying you weren’t in one of the red list countries. I think the British public would expect pretty strong action.
"We’re not talking now just about there being a lot of coronavirus in a country and you might bring some more of it back, what we’re talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter because we don’t want to be in a situation where we later discover there is a problem with the vaccines."
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