According to the airport’s managing director Karen Smart, the UK’s blanket requirement for travel testing "differs dramatically" to the approach taken by most European countries, which are allowing fully vaccinated passengers to travel between low-risk destinations without having to take any tests.
Smart cited the recent official data which shows only around 5% of positive PCR tests are being genomically sequenced.
While praising the government for asking the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to look into the testing industry in a bid to reduce prices, the airport said the recent statistics "highlight the need to scrap the blanket requirement for PCR tests altogether for vaccinated travellers".
Smart further slammed the UK’s traffic light system, which she claims caused the country’s aviation sector to recover at "half the rate" of the rest of Europe.
The airport’s July passenger figures show that passenger levels were 85.9% down compared to July 2019, when the airport served 3,178,505 passengers, compared to just 447,954 in the same month this year.
The latest traffic figures come as data from Airports Council International – Europe (ACI EUROPE) found that Europe’s airports are serving around 59% of pre-pandemic traffic, compared to 28% in the UK.
Smart said while it is encouraging that more people are taking the opportunity to go on holiday or visit friends and family overseas, "we are still yet to see a meaningful recovery in international travel".
"We won’t see a proper, sustained recovery until the UK overhauls its costly and restrictive travel regime, which is out of step with the rest of Europe," she added.
"UK passengers continue to be subjected to onerous and expensive PCR testing on the basis they will be sequenced to protect the UK from variants of concern, but it is clear this is not happening.
"We need a simple and sustainable system for travel, which people can understand and that is proportionate to the public health position here in the UK. The government must act urgently to review the system and re-evaluate the need for expensive PCR tests."
