Grant Shapps said it is unlikely that Spain and France will be re-added to the government’s travel corridor list anytime soon.
The news comes as the Government announced that passengers arriving in the UK from Croatia, Austria and Trinidad and Tobago will now have to quarantine for 14 days from 4am on Saturday.
And though Portugal has been added to the travel corridor list, the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has revealed that it is unlikely Spain and France will join it as destinations deemed safe for travel.
The destinations were added to the travel corridor list on July 3 with travel allowed from July 10.
But by July 25 anyone in Spain was subjected to a 14 quarantine on their return to the UK - prompting a mad panic to get out of the country and Jet2 told customers they must return on special evacuation flights - or make their own way home.
While France was removed from the list on August 14 after a spike in the number of cases of coronavirus.
The Transport Secretary told LBC: "At the moment I’m afraid France and Spain have both been going the wrong way.
"So just to put numbers on this, we respond when there are about 20 cases per 100,000 of the population measured over a seven-day rolling average. So 20 is the figure to bear in mind.
"I think that the last that I saw of Spain it was up in the 40s and 50s so a long way off that, and France, who… quarantined from last weekend, I’m afraid to say we were right to do that because we’ve seen the cases continue to carry on up in France as well.
"And in order to put a country back in to the travel corridor, what we say is it needs to stay below that number for a couple of cycles.
"So a cycle is two weeks long for coronavirus.”
