Heathrow wants travel opened up for vaccinated as Covid losses near £3bn

Heathrow airport has called on the UK government to open up travel for fully vaccinated passengers as it said its losses caused by the Covid-19 pandemic had reached almost £3bn.

The airport reported a £868m loss for the first half of 2021 and said restrictions and expensive testing requirements were hindering the UK’s economic recovery. Its total losses since the start of the pandemic stand at £2.9bn.

The UK’s largest airport said passenger demand was increasing, although it reported that fewer than 4 million people travelled through its terminals in the first six months of 2021, a number that would have been surpassed in only 18 days of 2019 traffic.

Amid travel restrictions and costly Covid test requirements for travellers, Heathrow cautioned that any increase in passenger numbers remained uncertain, and said it could still welcome fewer passengers in 2021 than 2020.

The airport had its busiest days of the year at the weekend, with approximately 60,000 passengers a day – compared with lows of about 7,000 – although that is still only about a quarter of 2019 averages. Heathrow’s chief executive, John Holland-Kaye, said it “was wonderfully busy compared to where we have been”, but that there had been problems as numbers returned. “There were a couple of issues; the main one was Border Force, who had a combination of officers being pinged and the egates not working, which led to a queue going up to two hours.”

However, he said such queues in immigration were no longer the norm, despite his past criticisms of Border Force. “That’s unusual now, they’ve been much better recently.”

He said Heathrow’s own security had faced problems recently through the “pingdemic”, where people are notified of Covid contact through the NHS app, despite the airport being part of the pilot scheme to allow testing since January. “About a quarter of our shift was pinged at the same time, causing queues. The challenge is they all need to be tested and get results back before coming back, even as part of the scheme that causes a blip.”

Heathrow welcomed recent changes to the government’s traffic light system for travel from England, with more summer holiday destinations added to the “green” list. As a result, the airport expects to welcome 21.5 million passengers in 2021 because of the pent-up demand for travel, a small decline compared with last year but a fall of almost 75% compared with 2019.

“The UK is emerging from the worst effects of the health pandemic but is falling behind its EU rivals in international trade by being slow to remove restrictions,” Holland-Kaye said. “Replacing PCR tests with lateral flow tests and opening up to EU and US vaccinated travellers at the end of July will start to get Britain’s economic recovery off the ground.”

Heathrow said trade routes between the EU and the US have recovered to almost 50% of pre-pandemic levels, while trade between the UK and the US remained 92% down.

Holland-Kaye said: “We’re through the worst – having been hunkered down minimising all of our costs for the last year and a half, we’re now planning for the recovery.”

But he argued that as travel still faced government restrictions, ministers should grant the sector an extension to the furlough scheme, as many companies were considering making redundancies when it ended. Holland-Kaye said that while employees’ jobs were safe for now, he was concerned that ground handler, retail and airline operators could fire staff.

“I had a meeting with all the companies operating at Heathrow the other day to plan for recovery and particularly to avoid redundancies when furlough comes to an end, because I think we’re going to need those people when demand comes back,” he said. “It only needs one company to not have enough people, as we saw with Border Force, and suddenly you create congestion.”