The ‘Declaration to Travel’ form comes into effect today, with passengers travelling overseas from England now required to complete and carry the exit permit.
The move is the latest tightening of the UK’s border controls, and is the strictest crackdown on movement the UK has seen since the World Wars. Under the rule, anyone who enters “a port of departure to travel internationally” in England without a completed form will be committing a criminal offence, regardless of whether are legally entitled to travel.
The form asks passengers to detail why they are travelling abroad, along with personal information such as home address and passport number. Anyone who is found by police attempting to travel without an essential reason – or without a form – will be sent home and risk being handed a a fixed penalty notice for breaking the travel ban. These fines start at £200, and double for each incident, going up to a maximum of £6,400.
Airlines, ferry companies and train operators are now also also legally obliged to explain on their websites that the document must be filled out before travelling. From today (March 8) they must check that passengers have completed the form before they board, and deny boarding to those without it.
The measure is a “necessary step to protect the public and our world-class vaccination programme”, Home Secretary Priti Patel told parliament in January; the details, however, were not published until Friday, some 40 days after it was announced.
One in three destinations worldwide are now completely closed to international tourism, latest data from the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) shows, with total closures to tourists are most prevalent in Asia, the Pacific and Europe.
Though vaccination efforts are ramping up across the globe, many governments have reversed efforts to ease restrictions on travel due to the emergence of new variants of Covid-19 – 32 per cent of all destinations ( 69 in total) are shut for international tourism. Of these, just over half (38 destinations) have been closed for at least 40 weeks. At the same time, 34 per cent of worldwide destinations are now partially closed to international tourists.
Of the 69 destinations where borders are completely closed to tourists, 30 are in Asia and the Pacific, 15 are in Europe, 11 are in Africa, 10 are in the Americas and three are in the Middle East. The UNWTO travel restrictions report covers 217 countries.
On a more positive note, the research also indicates a trend towards adopting a more nuanced, risk-based approach to travel restrictions: as many as 32 per cent of all worldwide destinations now have the presenting of a negative PCR or antigen test as their main requirement for international arrivals, often combined with quarantine. The same amount have made tests a secondary or tertiary measure.
UNWTO secretary-general Zurab Polilikashvili said:
Dr Susan Hopkins, Public Health England’s strategic response director for COVID-19, said the population may have less immunity to respiratory viruses such as flu due to the coronavirus pandemic. She stated it was “highly unlikely” that a new COVID variant would derail the plan to start easing England’s lockdown “for the next three to five weeks” on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, but added: “We’ll need to monitor carefully as new strains come into the country from around the world.”
“We could see surges in flu, we could see surges in other respiratory viruses and other respiratory pathogens. It’s really important that we’re prepared from the NHS point of view, from public health and contact tracing, that we have everything ready to prepare for a difficult autumn.”
