Grant Shapps shocks the UK travel industry
Post-mortem on the announcement
Well, that was a bit of a shocker. The UK government’s much anticipated announcement of changes to the travel restrictions list came out substantially worse than anyone, including me, had predicted. And nobody was expecting much good news.
Before getting into discussing what it means, I’ll get the easy bit out of the way. Marking my homework in terms of the accuracy of my predictions.
New green list countries
I predicted we’d get Malta, Finland and some Spanish and Greek islands. We got nothing. 0/3.
Green to amber
I thought that Portugal would stay green and it went amber. I’ll come back to the reasons why, but for the moment let’s just record that as a 0/1 score.
Red to amber
There was one candidate here (Turkey), which I predicted wouldn’t move and it didn’t (1/1).
New reds
I predicted that we’d get one or two of eight possible new red destinations. We actually got seven new additions to the red list. Three of them were on my list (Bahrain, Costa Rica and Trinidad and Tobago). So I’m going to score that as 3/7, which might be a bit generous but I need the points!
So overall, a score of 4/12. Pretty bad.
What went wrong?
It’s clear to me that the government decided to abandon any pretence of following an objective framework for putting countries into categories based on risk. Even if you accept that Portugal might have switched categories, Malta’s case rate is now less than half that of Portugal when it was put on the green list, yet it was left as amber.
The reasons given for reclassifying Portugal also don’t make much sense, if they were sticking to the same classification criteria. When the country was put on the green list, the case rate was 32.7 weekly cases per 100,000. The latest figure is 37.4, a 14% increase. Grant Shapps chose to focus on the test positivity rate, because that shows a bigger percentage increase. That’s because the volume of testing has gone down a bit. But Portugal has one of the highest rates of testing in Europe, so the case rate is a much better indicator. In any event, he claimed that the positivity rate had “nearly doubled”. In the data the government published to support rating it as green, the rate was 0.7%. It is now 1.1%, unchanged since May 14.
It seems inconceivable that when Portugal was put on the list, the government didn’t leave headroom for increases of that magnitude. So a rise in cases can’t be the reason for the change, if the policy has remained consistent.
A second reason was cited. Grant Shapps said that “there is a sort of Nepal mutation of the India variant”. A government statement said that there had been 68 cases of the Delta (India) variant recorded in Portugal. The UK has had 16,038 confirmed cases of the Delta variant and it is now the dominant strain in the UK, so 68 cases doesn’t seem to be more than a drop in the ocean. But apparently some of the cases had a mutation “previously seen in Nepal”. What is this Nepal variant? The WHO don’t seem to have heard of it.
Occam’s razor
A far more simple explanation for why Portugal was moved to the amber list is that it was the only destination on the green list with any significant leisure travel volumes. The government has decided it really doesn’t want anyone travelling overseas at all, and if they do travel, they don’t want them returning home without having to quarantine.
They talked about a “safety-first” approach and made it clear that their priority is to “protect the unlock”. That’s their slogan for preserving the final relaxation of domestic restrictions planned for the 21st June.
That is a perfectly valid position to take, and one that opinion polls show is popular with voters. I just wish they had been honest that they were doing a U-turn and tearing up the traffic light system, or at least suspending it until further notice.
Where does this leave the industry?
Understandably, today’s announcements led to a high level of vitriol from airlines and other travel companies, who saw their share prices damaged and the prospect of another lost summer now looking much more likely.
It is hard to argue with the headline of Simon Calder’s tweet:
