Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what criteria is used to place countries on the UK travel ban red list.

The Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) produces risk assessments of the spread of variants of concern internationally. These risk assessments cover a range of factors for each country including assessment of surveillance and sequencing capability, available surveillance and genome sequencing data, evidence of in-country community transmission of COVID-19 variants, evidence of exportation of new variants to the United Kingdom or other countries and travel connectivity with the UK.

Decisions on the risk assessment are taken by Ministers and are informed by evidence including JBC’s analysis as well as other relevant information about the risk of the spread of variants.