Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 8th of December.

And today, well, I am going to be talking about a subject which I have rather foreseen happening

over the past couple of years. And that is the reversal of the ban on European Union citizens using national

identity cards to come to the UK. You might recall that one of the flagship proposals and policies of

Brexit was to ban Europeans with ID cards saying you can only come in

if you have a passport. Now that was brought in by Pretty Patel, the home secretary and very keen

Brexiteer. She said she wanted to end the use of insecure ID cards for people to enter

our country. We're delivering, she said, on the people's priority to take back control of our

immigration system and that this move was imperative to help clamp down on the criminals that

seek to enter our country illegally using forged documents.

Well, whatever effect it might have had in that direction, its impact on inbound tourism has been immense.

It disenfranchised more than 200 million European Union citizens who have national ID cards, but not passports, from coming to the UK.

And previously, there was a fairly healthy inbound travel business from groups of schoolchildren, of course, particularly from France, because they could just nip over on the ferry, come and speak some English,

visit Canterbury Cathedral, whatever they wanted to do, it was all very easy.

But then the UK made it very difficult.

And for summer last year, compared with pre-Bet Brexit and pre-COVID numbers,

the Institute of Tourist Guiding said that school groups were down 99%.

Even the chief executive of Visit Britain, Patricia Yates, told MPs at a select committee meeting,

you will find destinations like Hastings absolutely decimated by a lack of school

visits. And, well, it's very easy to tell where these groups were going, mostly to Ireland,

some to Malta, English-speaking countries within the EU with no red tape. Now, of course, just to touch on the fact that some

people would say, well, we have to have a passport to go to their countries. So why are we complaining?

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