‘Far too early’ for Britons to be thinking about booking summer holidays, vaccines minister says

Nadhim Zahawi said that British travellers should not book summer 2021 holidays yet.

Those looking forward to jetting off this summer are warned that it is still ‘far too early’ to be thinking about going away given the rate of the virus in the UK. 

When asked if it was too soon for the public to book holidays, vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi said:

“Absolutely. I think it’s far too early.

“There’s still 37,000 people in hospital with Covid at the moment. It’s far too early for us to even speculate about the summer.”

He later spoke to Times Radio where he said it was still ‘too early’ to know if summer holidays will go ahead. 

There will be a meeting with senior ministers held today to consider further travel restrictions including the possibility of requiring travellers to quarantine at a designated hotel.

It is not clear the exact details of such a measure including how long this would be in place for. 

“There will be an announcement on this issue later on today,” Mr Zahawi said.

The BBC reports that ministers are expected to approve the plan to require UK citizens to quarantine in a hotel if they arrive in the country from a high-risk country.

Speaking to Sky News, Mr Zahawi said: “We review our border policy like any other responsible country would – Germany and Canada did a similar thing in January.

“We’ve done that with the pre-departure testing that is now required to enter the UK and of course with passenger locator forms.

“There will be an announcement on this issue later on today, so I can only say to you that it is the right thing to do, because I am the vaccines minister, that as we vaccinate more of the adult population, if there are new variants like the South African or the Brazilian variants, we need to be very careful.

“We acted on those very quickly and of course dealt with travel from those countries, and from Portugal and elsewhere, rapidly so it is important we continue to review our border policy and an announcement will be made when a decision has been taken.

“And of course the industry itself will be engaged with heavily, including (Health Secretary) Matt Hancock engaging with the industry to explain the decision making at health, as well as of course the business department with the Business Secretary.”

Chief executive of Best Western hotel groups told the BBC that the hotel industry was ready to assist the government if they did opt for such a policy. He said the sector was ‘familiar and accustomed to managing Covid-positive customers in our hotels’. 

Mr Paterson added: “From the hotels’ perspective, we would have to treat each of these customers as Covid-positive, so we would have to have strong infection control and protocols around security in the hotel to ensure we can deliver safely.”

An announcement on this from the government is expected to be made on Wednesday.