Quarantine: ‘No desire’ by government to allow testing, claims senior travel industry figure

Exclusive: ‘Grant Shapps says the same thing in every interview and there’s never any progress,’ said Paul Charles

Isolation station: Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport (Simon Calder)

A leading travel industry figure has attacked the government’s strategy on quarantine, saying: “This is an overt effort to stop people travelling.”

Paul Charles, founder of travel consultants The PC Agency, was speaking after Grant Shapps defended extending the requirement for 14 days of self-isolation for people returning to the UK from the Czech Republic, Jamaica and Switzerland.

On the BBC Today programme, the transport secretary said: “You have to know that there is a chance that you get a country like, as happened with Jamaica, where from nowhere, and no one was talking about it a week ago, we find that the level of cases – but not only that, the speed of increase – and the number of positive tests has just increased the point where you can't ignore it.

“No responsible government can do that. We must protect our hard-won gains.”

But Mr Charles, who has worked with the Quash Quarantine group to press for testing as an alternative to self-isolation, said: “There is absolutely no difference the government can make between an NHS testing centre in an Ikea car park and a test at Heathrow.

“If I go to a NHS mobile testing site, and I’m tested and negative, I am then free to roam. If I arrive at Heathrow and I am tested with the same swab test, why aren’t I free to roam?

“How many jobs have to go before you say, ‘It’s not working’? At what point do you say, ‘We’ve really decimated the sector’?

“We’re seeing deliberate, managed decline of the travel industry."

Heathrow airport has already established a testing centre at Terminal 2, but the government insists that all arrivals from non-exempt countries must self-isolate for two weeks.

In the Today interview, Grant Shapps said: “I'm working with the airports on this issue. But it's one of those things that sound very straightforward. But actually and slightly counter-intuitively, if you test somebody who is asymptomatic on day one when they arrive back at the airport that test is highly unlikely to find somebody who may actually already be incubating the disease.

“Whatever the [success] figure is it's nowhere near 100 per cent. To get there what you need to do is actually test a week later. That’s the only way to know. And in between time the person still has to be quarantining.

“So it's not the silver bullet solution, but we are of course working very closely with the airports, with the travel industry and with the medical experts to look at systems which might work.

“But it's not as straightforward, I’m afraid, as some people make it sound.”

Mr Charles said: “Grant Shapps says the same thing in every interview and there’s never any progress.”

A spokesperson for Abta, the travel association, said: “The addition of the Czech Republic, Jamaica and Switzerland to the Government’s quarantine list, and the FCO advisories against all but essential travel to those countries, will have upset the travel plans of many customers, and added to the difficulties of their travel organisers.

”As long as quarantine remains the principal strategy in the government’s containment of Covid-19, the travel industry will continue to suffer.

“Given the rapid change in infection rates in different areas, it is vital the government moves as quickly as possible to assess risk on a regionalised, not whole-country basis.

“Only by doing this will we be able to minimise the impact on consumer confidence to book and to travel, and minimise the impact on an industry that has already seen 90,000 livelihoods affected.”

The transport secretary rejected the system used by countries such as Germany and Belgium, of targeting specific regions, saying that the UK government could not get the required data.

But Mr Shapps hinted that the Spanish islands might be classified differently from mainland Spain.

The whole country, which is normally the most popular with British holidaymakers, is currently a no-go zone.