Earlier this month, ministers confirmed France would be excluded from a move to end quarantine for fully vaccinated arrivals from amber list countries.
France was instead placed in a so-called "amber plus" category requiring all arrivals from France to continue to have to self-isolate for 10 days upon their arrivals, regardless of their vaccination status.
Foreign secretary Dominic Raab denied the move was a mistake on Thursday (29 July), despite admitting the rule stemmed from a rise in cases of the Beta variant in Reunion – a French department.
Speaking to Sky News on Friday (30 July), Shapps said the "out of schedule" change was made for France due to "specific concern" over the Beta variant.
"It’s really important that [as] new evidence comes to light, and if it’s of concern, we don’t sit on that information," said Shapps. "If we didn’t act as a government, people would say, ’well why didn’t you do anything about it?’.
"The big concern is that we don’t allow a variant in which somehow is able to escape the vaccine programme that we’ve got."
Shapps also claimed the variant was "not just on an island thousands of miles away", but was also traced to areas in northern France.
"All the evidence has been pulled together, the latest research on how the vaccine works with the Beta variant, the scale of the Beta variant in France and the rest of it, and these decisions will of course be constantly reviewed," he added.
"It’s always disappointing for any country to be put on anything other than our green list, I appreciate that. I spoke to my opposite number, Jean Baptiste [Djebbari, French minister for transport] yesterday, and we’re agreed, we will always follow the science on these things."
