Turkey has said it expects to be removed from the UK’s travel red list within days, as ministers prepare to update the traffic light system for the final time this summer.
Before changes are due to be signed off by the government on Thursday, there is also pressure for restrictions to be eased on passengers arriving from Pakistan.
However, senior Whitehall sources downplayed any suggestion of a drastic overhaul, indicating that the announcement is not likely to affect as many holidaymakers as previous reviews.
After quarantine rules were relaxed last month, allowing fully vaccinated travellers returning from amber-list countries to avoid self-isolating, attention is particularly focused on the red list, which has 60 countries on it.
Only British residents and nationals are allowed to travel from these countries to the UK and they must stay in a hotel for 11 nights on their arrival, at a starting price of £2,285 per adult.
Government insiders told the Guardian that the red list was no longer viewed as a mechanism to temporarily pause passenger traffic, but a more medium-term block.
Turkey and Pakistan are among the red-list countries hoping to be moved on to the amber list. This would mean all passengers would be allowed into the UK again as long as they test negative for Covid before travelling. Some will have to isolated at home for up to 10 days, while those who were fully vaccinated in the UK, Europe or US with a drug approved by their respective regulators could skip quarantine altogether.
Turkey’s embassy in London said the latest scientific data “supports our expectation” that the country “will be removed from the red list at the upcoming review”. It said case numbers in Turkey were “decreasing and lower than the UK”, with the seven-day average in Turkey standing at 232.46 cases per 100,000 people, compared with 464.76 in the UK.
The embassy also sought to show it was being transparent about its data, saying Turkey was now uploading the third most genome sequences of any country in the world, and added that countries now allowing in fully vaccinated Turks included the US, Germany, France and Ireland.
It is offering citizens the Pfizer vaccine and Sinovac. The latter has not been approved for use in the UK by the MHRA, the medicines regulator.
“We expect the UK to take into account all these developments and remove Turkey from the red list this week,” the embassy said in a statement, adding that it could allow about 500,000 Turks living in the UK to conduct “essential travels”.
Ministers are also facing calls for Pakistan to be removed from the red list. The Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi and the Conservative MP Rehman Chishti, who lead the all-party parliamentary group on Pakistan, wrote to the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, urging him to reclassify it as amber.
They said there were no variants of concern in Pakistan other than Delta, which already accounts for the majority of cases in the UK, and keeping Pakistan on the red list was “causing grievous suffering to so many people within the diaspora who have been unable to see family members, particularly parents who are seriously ill, as well as separating spouses and children”.
