All remaining Covid travel measures, including the passenger locator form and tests for all arrivals in the UK, will be scrapped from 4am on Friday March 18, the government has announced.
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said the changes were “possible due to our vaccine rollout” and would mean “greater freedom in time for Easter”.
The forms required people to fill in travel details including their address in the UK and vaccination status.
The scrapping of the travel rules form part of the government’s plan for the UK to live with Covid.
It came as the latest data from the Office for National Statistics showed an increase in cases across the whole of the UK.
But Sajid Javid, the health secretary, said this was expected following the lifting of all domestic rules in England
“We are now open as a country and there’s more social mixing, but there’s nothing in the data at this point in time that gives us any cause for concern,” he told the BBC.
There were 72,898 cases of Covid reported in the UK on Friday. On February 24, when most of the remaining restrictions in England came to an end, there were 38,933 cases reported.