Highland MSP slates Holyrood's 'rush job' on air travellers' quarantine
The scramble to bring in hotel quarantine for airport travellers at short notice caused mayhem for airport managers, members of Holyrood’s health and sport committee heard today.
Plans were seriously mooted to give contractors access to sensitive areas and restricted zones of the airport without criminal record checks, the committee was told.
Instead, those staff were to be given the same low-grade security clearance normally given to nightclub bouncers.
“Obviously, we were against this,” Mark Johnston, chief operating officer of AGS Airports, told the committee.
“It goes against everything we try and do for airport security.”
Mr Johnston said fortunately, this guidance, handed down he believed by Scottish government transport officials, in the end did not need to be followed.
However, he said it later emerged had it been acted upon, airports would have been in breach of the Department for Transport’s airport security regulations.
“There was a real lack of understanding as to how airport processes work,” he said.
“Security clearance is very stringent for staff that work airside, beyond security. They have to have had background checks like criminal record checks, etc, and that can take anything up to six weeks. So, one of our first questions was ‘how are we going to get this in place by Monday – there won’t be the proper security credentials’.
"And we were told that there was an “alleviation” being granted whereby the contractor would be operating off an accreditation, which I think is the same accreditation that you get when you are a bouncer at a nightclub.”
Mr Johnston added: “We managed to find some safe work around it but we did follow up with the Department for Transport after and we were told that if we had put this in place we would have had a deficiency notice. It typifies the challenge we had trying to put this in at last minute at haste.”
Highlands and Islands MSP David Stewart said he was very concerned to hear about this “rush-job”.
“The Scottish Government has been on the back-foot throughout so much of this pandemic," he said, "and this is startling to hear that they were planning to make it possible for airport staff to enter restricted zones, get close and probably even onto the aircraft, with only the accreditation of nightclub security staff.
"This was a rush job, the government should have been better prepared.
“And they are doing, it would appear to me, the same with the vaccine passports roll-out – dragging their heels while the EU is already full steaming ahead.”