The UK’s Passenger Locator Form (PLF), which has to be filled in by all arrivals in the country, could be gone by Easter, according to Huw Merriman MP, chair of the House of Commons’ Transport Select Committee.
Speaking at the Business Travel Association’s spring conference last week, Merriman said: “The key thing we’re trying to push on right now is the Passenger Locator Form. The Department for Transport cannot see the point of it.
“We don’t need restrictions domestically so why the heck do we need to be asking all these questions of people when they come back into the country?”
Merriman suggested the Department of Health and Social Care was against the removal of the PLF and remained “sore” about the dropping of testing requirements. Ireland dropped its requirement to fill in its own PLF on Sunday (6 March).
The Conservative MP for Bexhill and Battle continued: “It’s our job to put it to the prime minister and then ultimately to try and get it [the PLF] dropped by Easter, which I’m pretty confident we’ll do. We have to constantly chip away. It’s slower than I’d like but we do get there.”
Merriman conceded that the government was “a bit too slow to recognise the importance of the [business travel] sector” when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and that it tends to view travel and aviation as one large sector rather than business travel separately.
“We tend to focus on travel as a whole,” he added. “We know travel was 97 per cent down in April 2020 but we don’t break it down into what’s the leisure market and what’s business.”
Clive Wratten, BTA’s CEO, said that removing the PLF in time for Easter in mid-April was symptomatic of that thinking: “Getting rid of the PLF by the [Easter] holidays doesn’t matter to a business traveller. We need to be getting people travelling now.”
Wratten continued: “We have a huge job to do to show the importance of business travel and it does tend to get wrapped up in aviation. There’s still a lot of education to be done but we have come a long way.”
Merriman said the provision of data that “takes us in the realm of economic performance” will help get the business travel industry on the government’s radar. “Data is brilliant. It makes the case; it changes things,” he added.
“It really allows you to blow a hole in some of the things the government is doing,” stressed Merriman. “That whole concept of ‘we have testing because we need to find the variants of concern’... I worked with Manchester Airports Group to really drill into the department’s own data and it was extraordinary.
“In three weeks in July, there were half a million people who had to do a test when coming in [to the UK] and 4,000 of those tested positive – suggesting do we really need it [testing]? But only 10 per cent of those 4,000 [positive tests] were actually tested for variants of concern. We had the data that demolished it completely.”
Asked whether the government had a joined-up transport strategy for the UK, Merriman said that devolution has “made it even harder to join everything together”.
He continued: “You also have a lot of different politics across the countries and that plays into to it as well. I would probably argue that things have got worse rather than better.”
Merriman also criticised the lack of accountability when major infrastructure projects go wrong, pointing to HS2 in particular.
“We always seem to build over schedule and way over cost and there don’t seem to be any ramifications. If you work in private industry and deliver something ridiculously late or double the budget you’d lose your job,” he said.
“HS2 could be a damn-sight better if it went all the way to Leeds. It’s such a wasted opportunity.”