Airlines UK chief executive Tim Alderslade has said tens of thousands of jobs are at risk in the aviation sector due to the pandemic and following the Government’s changes to travel rules in recent weeks, including the “total disaster” of placing France on the ‘amber-plus’ list.
All travellers entering the UK from green list locations do not have to self-isolate. Those from amber list locations, such as the US, Jamaica, Spain, Italy and Greece, must have had both doses of a coronavirus jab as part of the UK’s vaccination programme to avoid the requirement to self-isolate for 10 days.
But the amber-plus list, containing only France at present, scraps that quarantine exemption for the double-jabbed.
Speaking on Times Radio, Mr Alderslade said: “If you’ve been fully vaccinated, or you’re coming from a green country, there is not the need for a PCR test upon arrival when you’ve already done a pre-departure test.
“But we’ve somehow got to find a way of using the vaccine dividend that we built up, using the fact that case numbers are relatively stable, using the fact that when people come in to this country, the positivity rate, once they’re tested, is only 0.4% – so air travel is not a dangerous activity if you look at the numbers – to try to get more countries on that green list.
“Because of the way the Government has looked at things over the past couple of weeks with the France decision, which was a total disaster in terms of consumer confidence because people now think with amber, there’s a good chance that whether there’s a watch list or not, that they will be stranded, and that is a real dampener in terms of bookings.
“We’ve now only got six to eight weeks until the end of the summer, and tens of thousands of jobs are under threat in the travel and aviation sector.”
