Pre-departure tests scrapped for fully vaccinated travellers entering the UK from today

‘We’re an international country, people need to be able to travel’ said the transport secretary

A home travel test kit (Getty Images)

From today, fully vaccinated people and under 18s will no longer have to take a pre-departure Covid test before travelling to the UK.

These groups will also no longer have to self-isolate between arriving home and receiving the results of their “day two” PCR test.

The new rules, which came into effect at 4am, were announced by the prime minister on Wednesday.

“From Friday we will be scrapping the pre-departure test... we will also be lifting the requirement to isolate on arrival,” Mr Johnson said during PMQs on 5 January.

The transport secretary Grant Shapps then confirmed the full details on Twitter, saying: “By reducing testing requirements for fully vaxxed passengers to just a lateral flow post-arrival, we’re supporting the safe reopening of international travel.”

The new rules enabling double jabbed arrivals to take a cheaper lateral flow instead of a PCR as their “day two” post arrival test come into play slightly later, from 4am on Sunday 9 January.

Travellers will still need to pay for their LFTs, ordering a professional kit and adding a reference number to their passenger locator form before travelling home.

However, these usually cost half the price of the PCR equivalent, meaning savings of hundreds of pounds for each family or group holiday.

Travel rules for unvaccinated or partly vaccinated people aged 18 and over - “fully vaccinated” in this case means two doses or more - remain the same.

Unjabbed travellers will still have to present a negative pre-departure test result (PCR or antigen) before embarking on their journey to the UK, quarantine for 10 days after landing, and take PCR tests on days two and eight of self-isolation.

At present, 47,565,340 people in the UK have had two doses of the vaccine - some 70 per cent of the total population.

Speaking to the BBC yesterday, Mr Shapps said that extra travel testing was no longer useful now that the Omicron variant is “widespread and worldwide”, saying the pre-departure test rule added in December had “outlived its usefulness”.

“We have to get away from the idea that within the UK we’re a safe haven but the rest of the world is dangerous - that’s not the case,” the transport secretary told the BBC.

“We’re an international country, people need to be able to travel - we need to travel to be able to see family, do business, and keep the economy going.

“Seeing [that] Omicron is everywhere, Omicron testing has really outlived its usefulness, and we don’t keep things in place when there’s no point to having them there.”

In the same update, Mr Shapps announced promised a further travel review at the end of January, with ministers taking a broader look at how travel will function in the year ahead.

“We’ll do a full review of travel measures by the end of Jan to ensure a stable system is in place for 2022,” he tweeted.