ISLANDS like the Canaries, Ibiza or Mallorca could be added to safe travel lists in future as the Government explores “regional” quarantines, Grant Shapps suggested this morning.
Just weeks after the islands were added to the quarantine lists due to a large spike in cases in Spain, the Transport Secretary said in future he wanted to be able to look at data for regions if possible.
At the time the inclusion of the islands sparked uproar among tourists as the rates of infection on the island were far below that of mainland Spain.
Today Mr Shapps raised hopes of a holiday on a Spanish island in the coming months as he said the Government were looking at how to make regional quarantines work.
He told the BBC earlier: “The islands, particularly the Spanish islands, when Spain went into lockdown, we saw in one the numbers coming up and in the other set the numbers coming down – so we do need to be absolutely sure that you’re capturing the disease as it actually is and sometimes it’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds.”
He added: “However, I think there is a case for regionalisation. I think it’s harder to do within a country – people say, with France for example, why don’t you just do this region and not the other?
“The answer is it’s quite easy to travel about the country so we’re not able to do it like that.”
He said: “Where there are islands, I think it’s something we have said before we will look at and we are looking at. It depends on levels of data you have.
“We are looking in to how you can do regionalisation effectively.”
However, on Sky News just minutes earlier he suggested it might be too difficult to do without the right levels of information.
He said: “It’s still rather too difficult to do the kind of regionalisation that you’re talking about because we just don’t have the same control elsewhere.”
