LIVE: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson Gives an Update on International Travel

LONDON – In the next few moments, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to give an update on international travel and whether it can open up in time for the summer.

Be sure to refresh this article in order to keep abreast of the updates given minute-by-minute. The Prime Minister is likely to implement a traffic-light system to allow such travel.

Updates

UPDATE #1 17:00BST – The Prime Minister enters the stage and thanks everyone for their patience, saying that “our collective efforts are paying off”.

UPDATE #2 17:13BST – International holidays are still illegal according to the next stage of the roadmap beginning on April 12th.

While @BorisJohnson will announce a new traffic lights system for travel later this afternoon, I’m told it might not be until May 10th that countries are confirmed in the red, amber or green categories. This would leave the travel sector firmly on ice for another month.
— Paul Charles (@PPaulCharles) April 5, 2021

UPDATE #3 17:14BST – A tweet from Paul Charles where he has been told that we may not find out the colour classification of countries until May 10th, which may indicate why the Downing Street Briefing has gone straight ahead to questions currently.

UPDATE #4 17:21BST – The Government has released the following statement regarding international travel:

“The roadmap said that any return to international travel without a reasonable excuse, for example, for holidays, would be no earlier than 17 May. Given the state of the pandemic abroad, and the progress of vaccination programmes in other countries, we are not yet in a position to confirm that non-essential international travel can resume from that point. Taking into account the latest situation with variants and the evidence about the efficacy of vaccines against them, we will confirm in advance whether non-essential international travel can resume on 17 May, or whether we will need to wait longer before lifting the outbound travel restriction”.
Gov.uk

It was also confirmed by the government that the traffic-light system will be put in place for when travel reopens, but we may end up not finding out that information for a while.

That concludes our live blog.