Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what evidential threshold will be used when reviewing the travel status of foreign countries under the covid-19 traffic light system.

Decisions on red, amber and green list countries are taken by Ministers, who take into account risk assessments produced by the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC), alongside wider public health factors.

Key factors in the JBC risk assessment of each country include:

• genomic surveillance capability
• COVID-19 transmission risk
• Variant of Concern transmission risk

A summary of the JBC methodology used to produce risk assessments is published on gov.uk.