What Prime Minister Boris Johnson said about vaccine passports and international travel

Mr Johnson confirmed on Monday, April 5 that the Government’s roadmap out of lockdown is on course, with non-essential retail, gyms and pub beer gardens all reopening from Monday, April 12.

In the briefing, the Prime Minister also faced questions on Covid certification – also called vaccine passports – and resuming international travel.

Speaking in response to questions, he said the Government is "some way off finalising any plans” on Covid or vaccine passports, highlighting “ethical and practical issues” surrounding vaccine certification.

Mr Johnson also announced on Monday that there will be test events in the coming weeks for how Covid certification may work.

He continued: “I want to stress there are complicated ethical and practical issues, as I think I said last time, raised by the idea of Covid status certification using vaccination alone.

“Many people will be for one reason or another unable to get a vaccine, for medical reasons for instance, or perhaps because they’re pregnant.

“So you have to be very careful how you handle this and don’t start a system that is discriminatory.

“But obviously we are looking at it – we want to be going ahead in the next few weeks with some test events, some pilot events. Big events, getting 20,000 people into Wembley on May 15, that kind of thing.”

The Prime Minister said he was hopeful that foreign travel could resume from Monday, May 17, when step three of the roadmap out of lockdown is set to be implemented.

He said that a global travel taskforce is set to report back to the Government later this week and decisions will be made on following that.

He added: “Obviously we are hopeful that we can get going from May 17, we are hopeful.

“But I do not wish to give hostages to fortune or to underestimate the difficulty we are seeing in some of the destination countries people might want to go to.

“What we are going to do, the global travel taskforce is going to report back later this week, we will then being setting out well before May 17 what is reasonable.”

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