Helen Whately says Brits need to 'look carefully' before planning foreign holiday as she suggests European hotspots could face fresh quarantines

 "If we see rates going up, we have to take action"

Britons should “look carefully” before booking foreign holidays, a health minister has warned, amid concerns quarantine rules could suddenly be imposed on a range of popular destinations.

Helen Whately defended the Government’s decision to scrap Spain from its list of travel corridors, as she reminded the public that agreements with other countries remain under constant review.

Travellers returning to the UK from Spain must now self-isolate for 14 days after Catalonia and Murcia saw a spike in Covid-19 cases at the end of last week.

However, other countries have also suffered a sharp rise in infections, with France recording 1,130 new Covid-19 cases on Friday – almost three times the average at the start of June.

Asked whether France and Germany could be next to face quarantine, Ms Whately told Sky News: "We have to keep the situation under review and I think that is what the public would expect us to do.

"If we see rates going up in a country where at the moment there is no need to quarantine, if we see the rates going up, we would have to take action because we cannot take the risk of coronavirus being spread again across the UK.”

French health authorities said at the weekend that the country’s R-rate was up to 1.3 and new daily infections on Friday had risen to 1,130 - indicators resembling those seen in May, when France was coming out of its strict two-month lockdown.

Meanwhile, Germany's R rate rose above 1 to 1.08 on Saturday, up from 0.93 on Thursday, which health authorities have been tracing to large gatherings and returning travellers.

People who are preparing to travel should look at Foreign Office guidance and check their travel insurance, Ms Whately stressed.

She said that individuals booking holidays needed to understand “we are in a global pandemic” and the Government was right to take “rapid action” where necessary.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, she said: “What we said throughout the time when we’ve put in place the policy on the travel corridors, the air bridges, is that we would need to keep those under review, that we would need to monitor the rates in other countries.

“That is exactly what we’ve done in Spain, so we are enacting the policy that we committed to doing.

“The rate was going up very rapidly in Spain and we had to take very rapid, decisive action.

“If we hadn’t taken that decisive action, I imagine you would be asking me ‘Why are there delays, why haven’t we taken robust action?’

“We have taken decisive action.”

The decision to reimpose restrictions on Spain left holidaymakers frustrated, with some saying they would not have travelled if they knew they would have to spend a fortnight self-isolating afterwards.

Close to 1.8 million holidays were likely to have been thrown into chaos by the move, according to travel company The PC Agency, which analysed the number of seats booked on flights leaving the UK for Spain between July 26 and August 31.

Trips to France, Italy and Greece are also now being cancelled in "large numbers" following the move, heaping further pressure on an already under-strain travel sector.

Labour shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth criticised the Government’s handling of the affair, labelling it "frankly shambolic", and called for financial support for those now forced to shut themselves away after their arrival home.

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