Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what criteria his Department used to inform its decision to put the United Arab Emirates on covid-19 red list for travel.

The Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) produces risk assessments of countries and territories. This risk is based on factors such as the level of community transmission of variants of concern or variant under investigation, levels of testing, genomic sequencing and reporting.

The decision to add the United Arab Emirates to the red list on 28 January was made by the Government, following analysis of the variant of concern first identified in South Africa and its strong travel connections to South Africa.

As with all our coronavirus measures, the Government keeps the red list under constant review and our priority remains to protect the health of the UK public.

A summary of the JBC methodology has been published on GOV.UK, alongside key data that supports ministers’ decisions.