The foreign secretary has warned of potential ‘legal challenges’ if the UK introduces air bridges allowing travel to specific countries.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast this morning, Dominic Raab the UK would be “very careful” about introducing the links, otherwise known as travel corridors.
It came as prime minister Boris Johnson met French president Emmanuel Macron face-to-face for the first time since lockdown today, with travel between the countries among the issues on the agenda.
Pressed on the UK’s position in the talks on travel corridors, Raab repeatedly stated that travel corridors would only be introduced when it is “safe and responsible” to do so – and reiterated previous government statements that the decision would be made based on the public health risk.
Raab said: “The key thing to us is to open up our airports and air traffic as soon as we can responsibly and safely do so. We’ve seen second waves and outbreaks in Europe and Asia. We want to be very careful.
“We will work through all of that with our French friends. There’s a risk of legal challenges if you just open up for one country and not others, so we want to make sure we can open up as soon as we safely and responsibly can do so.”
Raab went on to say the “details are complex” and that legal challenges could arise if countries were left out, or if the Eurotunnel was not included in travel corridors – and said it was the “ambition” of the UK government to find a way of allowing Brits to travel to France as well as other countries.
The foreign secretary was also quizzed on the enforcement of the UK’s quarantine rules, which were implemented for an initial three weeks on June 8 and advise all arrivals into the country to self-isolate for 14 days.
When it was put to him that people could bypass the rules by boarding public transports and that there were no checks at airports, he said criticism of quarantine was a “misunderstanding” of it as “advice” only and added that spot checks were being carried out.
“The public understands that we are all in this together and we need to be sensible,” he said.