Addressing the Commons’ transport committee on Wednesday (26 May), the transport secretary confirmed there would be a green list update on or around 7 June, and that he had held discussions with the government’s Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) over a new so-called "island policy".

Chair of the committee, Huw Merriman, asked Shapps whether at the next review, islands would be considered separately of their respective mainlands. Shapps said if you were able to travel to an island directly without transit via the mainland, it was "fair and proper to consider it separately".

However, he stressed there were other factors at play beyond the rate of new Covid infections in a destination, such as rates of vaccination and a location’s ability to detect variants via genomic sequencing. "On some of the islands, that is missing," said Shapps.

"So you can have an island that looks very good [in terms of Covid cases] but if you are not sequencing the genome, you don’t know whether variants are part of what might otherwise look okay. I’ve asked the JBC to consider islands within their criteria and where possible, look to include them if the facts stacked up."

Asked whether this could be done in time for the early June review, Shapps said while it was technically possible, it would depend on the quality of the data. "There are a large number of places in the world where they say it’s low, ’trust us’, but the data isn’t published to the standard that you’d expect from the Office for National Statistics, which itself bases publication [of figures] on internationally agreed standards," said Shapps.

"Last summer, we dealt with a lot of places where, in the end, we just couldn’t access the quality of data required to make those judgements that keep us safe."

Ben Bradshaw MP said people were promised a "vaccine dividend", and cited efforts in Europe and the US to restart travel based on vaccine certification and antigen test; he asked Shapps directly whether they could therefore expect any "significant" expansion of the green list in just over a week’s time to utilise the UK’s advantage on vaccination.

Shapps said even with the UK’s high rate of vaccination, it wouldn’t mitigate opening up to countries with 10 or 20 times the UK’s rate of Covid infection and saying "we’re safe", stressing that fully vaccinated travellers could still re-import new infections and new variants.

Bradshaw asked Shapps, with countries like Greece, Spain and Italy all now welcoming British visitors, whether the government would soon allow people to travel to these destinations without the barriers their amber list status imposes.

Shapps said taking Spain as an example, rates of vaccination were much lower than in the UK. "If you send people, even vaccinated people, to other countries – given vaccinations are not 100% reliable – then you are exposing them to risks that they don’t have if they stay in the UK," said the secretary of state. "You might say, ’that’s their risk’, but if they can bring that back, then that’s all of our risks. So we do have to move with the science."

’Risk appetite’

Pressing further, Bradshaw said unlike other countries, the UK’s rules failed to differentiate between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. In response, Shapps pointed to the first formal review of the government’s traffic light regime on 28 June, which he said would be an opportunity to explore whether there should be different rules in place for people who have been double vaccinated.

"If you’ve had a vaccination, then clearly there has to be a dividend from that," said Shapps. "But, as the scientists would say, take that very vaccinated population and send them to a place where they still don’t have it [Covid-19] under contro,l and you will bring back problems – even if you send fully vaccinated people there."

He added it would take a "brave, possibly even foolish" politician to override the JBC. "I can tell you vaccination is certainly part of the risk profile. In every single country you’ve mentioned, bar none, they have higher levels of coronavirus and lower levels of vaccination."

Merriman added the inherent risks posed by Covid-19 would likely exist well into the future, and put it to Shapps that at some point "we’re either going to have to change our risk appetite or never go to these wonderful places again".

Shapps said the statement was "a little misleading" as the risk factors would decrease as other countries achieved or exceeded rates the rate of Covid-19 vaccination in the UK.