Travel corridors: Germany and Sweden removed from UK quarantine-free list

Germany and Sweden have both been removed from the UK government’s list of travel corridors in its latest update.

Travellers returning or arriving from these destinations will be subject to the blanket two-week quarantine policy if they enter the UK after 4am on 7 November.

The UK’s transport secretary, Grant Shapps, tweeted: “We are removing SWEDEN and GERMANY from the Travel Corridor list. 

“From 4am Saturday 7 November, if you arrive into the UK from these destinations, you will need to self-isolate. All arriving passengers should complete a passenger locator form on arrival.”

He added that no new countries will be added to the list of travel corridors this week.

The Department for Transport (DfT) is continuing to update the list despite England’s national lockdown, which is in place from 5 November to 2 December.

During the lockdown, all non-essential travel, both domestic and international, is prohibited.

The DfT says that travel corridors will be used to mitigate the risk posed by inbound travellers during this period.

“Travel corridors do remain critical to the government’s Covid-19 response, keeping imported cases down,” said Mr Shapps.

The DfT said: “The government’s travel corridor policy remains a critical part of the government's Covid-19 response as it mitigates the risk of importing infections from abroad; this has not changed following the introduction of new restrictions in England.”

From 5 November, the DfT has introduced tighter restrictions, with Britons no longer permitted to travel for holidays, and those found in breach of the rules facing penalties starting at £200 and increasing to a maximum of £6,400.

The DfT advises those currently in Germany and Sweden to “finish their trip as usual, following the local rules and checking the FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office] travel advice pages on gov.uk for further information”.

It said that the two countries, which currently have much lower coronavirus rates than the UK, were removed from the travel corridors list following a significant change in the level and pace of confirmed cases of coronavirus in both destinations.  

The DfT said: “There has been a consistent increase in Covid-19 cases per 100,000 of the population in Germany over the past four weeks, with a 75 per cent increase in total cases over this time period. In Sweden, new cases per week have increased by 34 per cent over the same time period. 

“A range of factors are taken into account when deciding to remove a country from the exemption list, including the continued increase of coronavirus within a country, the numbers of new cases, information on a country’s testing capacity, testing regime and test positivity rate, and potential trajectory of the disease in the coming weeks.”   

Germany’s coronavirus rate of new cases per 100,000 residents over the past seven days is 140.4, while Sweden’s is 189.5, compared with the UK’s rate of 235.4.

The update comes as calls from the travel industry for enhanced government support grow ever louder.

Airlines UK, whose members include British Airways, easyJet, Jet2, Ryanair and Virgin Atlantic, has written to the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, with a list of demands to avoid further job losses.

The chief executive of Airlines UK, Tim Alderslade, has asked Mr Sunak to “support airlines to cover the costs of empty planes leaving the UK to bring home UK citizens following the travel ban”.

Over the next few days, carriers are operating repatriation flights that will collectively cost them many hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Mr Alderslade said that 30,000 jobs have been lost or announced by UK airlines. He called it “an economic and personal catastrophe for those affected, and a major blow to the UK economy”.