London Southend boss: Airport testing NOW is the only way to make passengers feel safe and get UK flying again
The chief executive of London Southend airport has said that the country’s airlines will only begin to recover when passengers are confident enough to fly again – and that means the government must impose a coronavirus testing regime now.
Aviation leaders had hoped that ministers would announce plans to put in place an airport testing system this week, but were let down yesterday as officials instead launched a new review of the process.
There has been no airport testing for Covid-19 in UK airports since the pandemic began.
Southend’s Glyn Jones slammed the decision as “deeply disappointing”, saying that the government did not “grasp the seriousness of the situation for both the aviation industry and the supply chain it supports”.
Speaking to City A.M., he said that the single best thing that the government could do to help the embattled sector was to give customers assurance that they could travel without needing to quarantine.
“For the industry, the key question is confidence among consumers and among potential travellers”, he said. “This has been completely undermined by the continuous tinkering with the quarantine arrangements.”
Just seven destinations in mainland Europe have stayed off the government’s red list of countries from which passengers must quarantine on return.
But, he said, any testing regime that the government puts in place must fulfil three criteria.
“In an ideal world, we need three things. The first is that the regime is completely reliable – as close to 100 per cent accurate as possible. If it isn’t, people’s confidence in it will not be what we need it to be.
“Second, it needs to be very fast – ideally, if it were being run at an airport in real time, you would know the results of the test in 30 minutes. Because if you don’t, you just can’t fly. Third, these tests need to be properly affordable and reasonable in price.”
Some private Covid tests cost over £100, he said, often at least twice as much as a standard short-haul flight on a carrier like Ryanair or Easyjet.
“If the tests aren’t affordable, there is a risk that air travel will de-democratised”, he added.
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He also said that it was more important for any testing trial to be expanded to cover European destinations as quickly as possible.
The business travel-heavy London to New York route has been much cited as a potential trial for the system, but with most of the UK’s airports prioritising leisure travel (including Southend) it would be “unhelpful” to put the route first.
‘Cold winter’ ahead but reasons for optimism remain
As with many aviation players, Southend has been hammered by the pandemic, with passenger numbers crumbling in the profitable summer season.
The airport had been on track to achieve 3m passengers this year, but said it would be far lower as a result of the pandemic.
“Over the summer, we expected 300,000 passengers a month, but we saw just handfuls instead”, Jones said.
As a result of the pandemic, Easyjet decided to pull out of its base at the Essex airport, taking with it about half of the 2.1m passengers who passed through Southend last year.
Despite the blow, Jones said that there was a “high degree of interest” in the carrier’s routes, which focused on holiday destinations such as Spain and Greece.
The focus on short-haul leisure destinations is one of the reasons why Jones thinks that Southend will come out ahead of the rest of the market as it begins to recover.
The other is the focus on London, which accounts for 61 per cent of the airport’s passengers and remains an “extremely resilient” market, he said.
But, with the already traditionally loss-making winter season coming up, Jones admitted that the airport was bracing for a “cold winter”.
Unlike many airports, Southend has largely been able to avoid job cuts, and has thus far cut just 19 jobs.
However, with the furlough scheme coming to an end and no government action on extending business rates relief to England’s airports – it is already in place in Scotland – Jones warned that further redundancies could not be ruled out.
“We just have to be honest with people. We’ve done everything we can to ease the hurt, but if we end up with a dreadful second wave we may have to make some more cuts.”