Simon Calder was answering travel questions last night in The Independent and I thought of this thread when he posted the following answer to a question about vaccinated travellers to amber list countries:
The response of the government is ever more mystifying. There’s long been a disconnect between ministers saying how effective the vaccine is, yet insisting travellers lucky enough to have had both jabs undergo endure the same very tough regime on arrival in the UK as unvaccinated people. The idea of lowering the barriers to overseas travel for fully vaccinated people appears only just to have occurred to ministers as a sensible way to balance risk and opportunity. Other countries have been doing this since February.
At present almost anywhere you might want to go on holiday, like Spain, France, Italy and Greece, is on the amber list, requiring self-isolation when you return and multiple tests.
There are at last leaks about the proposition that having both jabs allows you to swerve quarantine – though you’ll still need to test before your flight to the UK and again when you are back.
Details are still sketchy, and a government spokesperson saying: “we have commenced work to consider the role of vaccinations in shaping a different set of health and testing measures for inbound travel” – in other words, don’t expect a change any time soon.
There’s the tricky problem of what happens with unvaccinated kids. Anyone over 10 years of age must take the pre-departure test, over fours have to have a PCR test after they get home – and children of any age at present have to quarantine from amber list countries.