To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to offer tailored support for travel businesses whose recovery will be affected by new COVID-19 restrictions.
Answered on
13 December 2021
We have worked closely with the travel sector throughout the pandemic to help find ways to enable people to travel safely, while protecting public health.
England had relaxed the rules on our international travel programme and established a simpler system that separates countries into a red list and rest of world. However, eleven African countries are now on the red list, and all international arrivals must take a PCR test on or before day 2 and self-isolate until receipt of a negative result. These are temporary and precautionary measures to slow the spread of the Omicron variant – and to help protect the fantastic progress we have made through our vaccination programme to date.
Across the world countries are taking similar measures to identify and isolate cases amongst travellers from countries where omicron appears to be circulating.
We will review these measures in three weeks, at which point we will have a much greater understanding of the impact on vaccine effectiveness.
Where applicable, travel businesses can continue to apply for the Additional Restrictions Grant (ARG) scheme through their local authority, which is open until March 2022. Throughout the pandemic, over £2 billion of discretionary business grant funding was provided to local authorities via the ARG to support businesses in their local area. Local authorities determine how much funding to provide to businesses and exactly which businesses to target.