By Denis Sheehan MIH
Since the UK left the EU every school child, including those on organised trips, require a passport at the UK border. ID cards, which are commonly issued in the EU, and which are acceptable for travel to many other countries, are no longer accepted by UK border authorities.
Consequently these groups are going instead to other English speaking countries in the EU such as Ireland and Malta.
The UK Government recently recognised the existence of a problem and undertook to ameliorate it in the UK-France leaders joint declaration: “On school travel, the United Kingdom committed to ease the travel of school groups to the UK by making changes to documentary requirements for schoolchildren on organised trips from France.
“France commits to ensuring appropriate mechanisms are in place for visa free travel for children travelling on organised school trips from the United Kingdom and to facilitating the passage of those groups through the border.”
The scope and scale of the cost to UK tourism has been looked at in a report published by The Tourism Alliance comprising results from a survey of 145 business who plan and organise school group travel. Collectively these companies brought 728,000 school children to the UK in 2019.
The survey finds that while trips school group trips inside the EU have already recovered to well above 2019 figures (108%) the UK has only recovered 61% of the school group travel market it had.
Operators lay the blame for this squarely at the changes to passport requirements at the UK border. 74% of operators said that the requirement for all school children to have a passport to enter the UK was an extremely important barrier.
Joss Croft OBE, CEO of UKinbound has commented on the results of a new report about school group travel from the EU to the UK developed by The Tourism Alliance and published today: “Of course we understand the desire to protect and improve our borders but the Government’s one size fits all policy post Brexit of not allowing groups of schoolchildren from the EU who pose a minimal risk to national security to use ID cards to travel to the UK has meant that these excursions are now far more complicated and expensive.
The Tourism Alliance report concludes: “Naturally, these groups are going instead to other English speaking countries in the EU such as Ireland or Malta and so of course the revenue from this valuable segment of the market has drastically reduced for many tourism and hospitality businesses in the UK. The warm words we heard from President Macron and Rishi Sunak in March now need to be translated into action if we are to save businesses and livelihoods in this country.”
The full report can be downloaded here.
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