Crime and Policing Minister Kit Malthouse Speaks to T&G on Vaccine Passports, Self-Isolation & More

Policing minister Kit Malthouse has apologised for delays at airports and borders and has suggested to Tom Newton Dunn and Isabel Hardman on Times Radio's T&G on Sunday that airline staff could be made exempt from isolation.

I know Border Force is one of the frontline services that will be able to access more of this test and release. Yesterday we had a technical issue with the eGates where they went down for 90 minutes or so. That caused a problem and I'm very sorry about that and sorry for people who were inconvenienced. But as I say hopefully Border Force will be relieved of some of the impacts of the pandemic although of course, we have to be very careful, given that enclosed environment, about our own staff and their safety, their likelihood of getting infected as well as them spreading it to passengers.

TND: And airline staff? Would you exempt them too?

KM: So we would be in conversation with employers. There is a facility for employers with staff in critical functions like that to come forward to the government so we can appreciate what the problem is and try and find a solution with that. So as I say we're being as agile as we can to try and make sure we overcome these problems as we go, balancing it always balancing always against safety from the virus.

But Mr Malthouse ruled out moving forward the date from which people, who've had both coronavirus vaccine jabs, would be exempt from isolation:

Well, I don't think so Tom no, because there's a couple of things. First of all, we want to make sure that as many people as possible actually get jabbed and of course that programme...is still jabbing. And also we need to have the kind of natural firebreak, if you like, at the start of the school holidays, where people, you know, separate a little bit more. There's more atomization before we get towards the 16th (of August)

On whether Premier League football fans will be required to be full vaccinated to attend games from October, he said:

No, that's just speculation at the moment...I mean no doubt they will have looked at some of the impacts on the virus that came out of the matches in the Euros...There was obviously checking there as well on the COVID app on the phone but we'll be having a look at how that works and assessing that for the future. But at the moment I think that's all speculation.

On the policy of domestic covid passports, Kit Malthouse said there are cultural issues to overcome:

It's a big cultural change for us as a country. We've not been a country that has naturally had to show any kind of identification or papers when you're within your own territory, whereas some of those European countries do have that...So there's obviously a bit of a cultural issue there as well but as I say the policy is coming. We're focusing very much on where we think there's a high risk of contagion.

And on the challenge of dealing with the number of migrants crossing the channel from France to the UK:

We are fighting a large and quite sophisticated logistics operation, which is making money from bringing these people across the world and propelling them out in small boats into the Channel with some danger to their own lives. Now, our job is to try and get behind that business to understand how it works and then to degrade it, as well as trying to remove the incentive for people to come in the first place so that refugees, genuine refugees, who want to come to the UK can access those legitimate routes and come here safely and in a way that doesn't put them at risk in the Channel. But look, this is a really, really tough problem and we're seeing a rise in numbers this year, not least because we've become quite good at closing down other routes, and other routes have been less available to people who've been trying to get into the country. But nevertheless, it's something where we're trying our best to confront.

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