Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has explained why direct flights from India are still landing in the UK.
India has been placed on the red list for travel, meaning the UK Government considers it dangerous because of high coronavirus infection rates.
The variant of Covid first detected in India is now spreading rapidly in the UK, threatening to derail the lockdown lifting roadmap.
But people are still arriving in the UK on flights from the country.
Mr Shapps defended the continued availability of direct flights from countries such as India on the coronavirus “red list”.
He told Sky News: “You cannot prevent British citizens from returning home, no country can ban its own citizens.”
People on the flights were only British or Irish citizens, or those with permanent residence, and “it’s illegal come here as a holidaymaker from a red list country”.
Mr Shapps said it was simpler to send people to quarantine hotels from a direct flight.
If there were no direct flights “you would be forcing a situation where people end up spread amongst many other flights and making it harder to carry out the mandatory hotel quarantine”
Mr Shapps urged people to be patient and wait for the global coronavirus situation to improve if they wanted to go on holiday to countries which were currently on the “amber list”.
Asked why holidays were still being sold to countries which are on that list, Mr Shapps told Sky News the Government had moved away from a system where things were “banned and illegal” to a situation where people were expected to “apply a bit of common sense”.
He urged people to have “a little more patience as the world catches up with our vaccine programme”.
