Airport operator: PCR tests ‘a colossal waste of money’

The owner of Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports has said that UK government plans to force people returning from countries categorised as green under the proposed traffic-light system to take expensive PCR tests is "a colossal waste of everyone's money".

Currently, the UK Government proposes that all passengers – even those returning from the lowest risk ‘green’ destinations – will have to take a PCR test on their return, so it can gather data that will help with genomic sequencing.

Manchester Airports Group (MAG) said that the Government should co-operate more closely with other countries about the emergence of new Covid-19 variants of concern and their sequencing to eliminate the need for travellers to take expensive PCR tests on their return.

The group called on the government to introduce a fourth, restriction-free category capitalising on the success of the UK’s world-leading vaccination programme.

MAG’s comments came as it revealed that passenger numbers at its airports were down almost 90 per cent across the first 12 months of the coronavirus pandemic.

Manchester Airport handled just 95,798 passengers in March 2021, 89.8 per cent down on the 942,900 it handled 12 months earlier. At Stansted, the figure was 44,259 this March, compared with over 800,000 a year earlier – a 95 per cent drop. East Midlands Airport served just 71 passengers for the whole of March this year, against 106,529 in 2020.

Charlie Cornish, MAG CEO said: “The price tag attached to testing will hold back the recovery and hinder the sector’s ability to power the UK’s economic revival as a whole.

“The requirement to complete a PCR test on return from even the safest countries adds potentially unnecessary cost and the Government’s attention must now turn to finding smarter and more affordable ways to manage the risk posed by new variants of concern.

“This should be achieved by forging ever-closer partnerships with key markets and developing transparent ways of sharing data into these variants so they can be effectively contained.

“Where we can trust data from other countries, forcing people to spend money on expensive PCR tests, to obtain the very same information, would represent a colossal waste of everyone’s money.”