Health secretary Sajid Javid has announced that all 11 countries on the UK Government coronavirus travel red list will be removed from 4am tomorrow.
Mr Javid said the spread of Omicron in the UK and the world means the travel red list is “now less effective in slowing the incursion of Omicron from abroad”.
He told MPs: “So I can announce today that whilst we’ll maintain our temporary testing measures for international travel, we will be removing all 11 countries from the travel red list effective from 4am tomorrow.”
The health secretary said it remained unclear whether people currently in hotel quarantine will have to complete their stay. An 11-day hotel quarantine costs each traveller £2,285.
The red list of 11 nations was introduced two weeks ago to tackle the spread of Omicron, first identified in southern Africa.
Controversial testing measures, including pre-departure tests before returning to the UK and day 2 PCR tests, will stay in place and only be reviewed in the first week of January.
Mr Javid added: “Unfortunately there is now a very real risk that the exponential rise of Omicron cases translates into a spike of hospitalisations that threatens to overwhelm the NHS.
“We have done so much already to boost the capacity of the NHS, we have increased the number of doctors by 5,000 over the past year and the number of nurses by almost 10,000 and we have also expanded the number of beds available, but we have also had to put in place measures for infection control which have limited this capacity.”
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