The Passenger Locator Form required of international arrivals to the UK could be gone by Easter, at least in England, according to an influential Conservative MP.
Huw Merriman, chair of the Transport Select Committee of MPs, insisted yesterday: “I’m pretty confident we’ll get the Passenger Locator Form [PLF] dropped by Easter.”
Speaking at a Business Travel Association (BTA) conference in London, Merriman said: “The key thing we want to move on now is the PLF. The Department for Transport can’t see the point of it.”
He pointed out: “We don’t need all these questions domestically. Why have we all these questions for international travel?”
The Department of Health is opposed to removing the PLF, he said, suggesting the department remains “sore” at the removal of Covid-19 testing requirements for fully vaccinated arrivals from February.
Merriman argued: “We’ve got to get to a point where we get back to where we were. I think we’ll get there by Easter. That is the point I want to get it to.”
The PLF remains overly complicated but is the means by which fully vaccinated and unvaccinated arrivals are identified by airlines and Border Force.
Asked if he expects the removal of testing requirements for unvaccinated travellers by Easter, and therefore the need for the PLF, Merriman was less clear.
He suggested countries with 75% of their population fully vaccinated could be removed from the requirement to fill out the PLF and said: “I’m trying to find ways we can move to living with Covid. Let’s take the US out straight away.”
Merriman argued any future Covid requirements needed to take account of “the wider impacts on the economy including on sectors like yours”.
He conceded: “We were a bit slow to recognise the importance of your sector.”
Merriman added: “I don’t think we have a joined up transport strategy. Just look at the impact of devolution on Covid policies.”
BTA chief executive Clive Wratten argued: “We’ve come a long way on our lobbying and we’re not giving up on that. Two years ago there was a real lack of knowledge among the people [in government] we were talking to.
“You have to go through all the departments and they were not talking to each other.
“We’ve still got a huge job to do. But we’ve certainly come a long way. The needle has moved off empty to about one quarter of a tank.”
Wratten told the conference: “The aviation minister has promised me he will mention business travel every time he is interviewed.”
He added: “I was just in Berlin at the Global Business Travel Association [GBTA] conference where we had all the business travel associations in a room discussing how we act together on lobbying governments, in Brussels and Washington.”