Coronavirus: UK to spend £75m on charter flights to bring stranded Britons home

The UK is committing £75m to help Britons stranded abroad by chartering rescue flights when there are no other routes available.

Speaking at the daily Downing Street briefing on the coronavirus, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the new plan will assist tens of thousands of travellers.

Up to a million Britons are thought to be stranded as airlines and borders across the world shut down in a bid to stem the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Department for Trade have signed a memorandum of understanding with a group of airlines – Virgin, EasyJet, Jet2 and Titan Airways – to help travellers get back where they have tickets and where there are still commercial routes available. British Airways has also made a commitment.

Travellers will be allowed to use different carriers or fly on different days.

Where there is no commercial option, the FCO is going to use the travel management company CTM to organise charter flights to bring Britons home.

When availability comes up for a flight, embassies and missions around the world will alert any British national in their country wanting to come home.

Mr Raab said priority would be given to the most vulnerable – including the elderly or those with pressing medical needs – and also to countries where there are large numbers of British tourists trying to return to the UK.

Mr Raab said an “unprecedented” number of British travellers were trying to come back – which he estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

He said around 150,000 British nationals had already been helped back from Spain, while 8,500 were brought back from Morocco and 5,000 from Cyprus.

“We’ve not faced challenges like this in getting people home from abroad on this scale in recent memory,” he added.

Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry criticised the government’s efforts, saying: “We were promised a new strategy on repatriations today, but for the hundreds of thousands of Brits stranded abroad and their families back home it was just more of the same.

“More reliance on commercial flights, which, for too many British travellers based in too many locations, are simply not an option at present. More vague promises about charter flights, but none of the commitment or urgency other countries like Germany have put into this.”

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It comes as a further 180 people have died in the UK after testing positive for coronavirus, taking the total to 1,415.

The number, which was down from the previous day’s 207, counts those who died in the 24 hours up to 5pm on Sunday.

There has been almost a 50% rise in just a few days in the number of people being treated for coronavirus in England’s hospitals, according to new figures.

Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said on Friday more than 6,200 patients were in hospital with COVID-19. But on Monday, he said this figure had jumped to more than 9,000.

The government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said the number of hospital admissions is going up constantly and he expected them to worsen over the next two weeks.

He said the NHS was seeing around an extra 1,000 patients a day and described this daily rise as “stable”.

He told reporters: “I do expect that number to continue. I expect people coming every day to be about that, it may go up a little bit.

“And in two or three weeks you would expect that to stabilise and to start to go down a bit.”

Sir Patrick said the social distancing measures introduced this month were “making a difference” and transmission of coronavirus in the community was thought be decreasing.

And as the number of cases of coronavirus flattens, the number of people needing hospital admission should fall, he said.

He said the hospital intake rates show “we’re not on a fast acceleration”.

He added the UK is “tracking roughly along the same path as France, I’ve said before, we’re behind Italy in terms of the curve”.

Sir Patrick said the use of the London Underground has fallen dramatically and rail and road transport is also down a lot.

Meanwhile, health minister Helen Whately has defended the UK’s coronavirus testing regime following growing calls for the country to hugely expand its programme.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock claimed on Sunday the UK has reached 10,000 tests a day, which he added was ahead of schedule as the government works towards conducting 25,000 tests a day.

In its latest daily testing figures, Public Health England (PHE) said 8,278 tests were carried out on 4,908 people as of 9am on Sunday. That figure is down from 9,114 tests at 9am on Saturday.

PHE also said almost 11,000 tests a day can now be carried out.

Earlier, the head of the Royal College of Physicians, Professor Andrew Goddard, said around one in four NHS doctors was off work sick or in isolation.

(c) Sky News 2020: Coronavirus: UK to spend £75m on charter flights to bring stranded Britons home