The PHE form (which the police here say you need to file if you leave UK airspace even if you don’t land abroad, bizzarely) is almost impossible to file.
Every time I try it, the login has to be done from fresh. It sends you an SMS with a validation code, and then sends you an email with a validation link. The SMS often doesn’t arrive and the email arrives even less often.
Hilariously, the email contains the URL without spaces around it so it doesn’t show as a clickable link 
This will confuse the hell out of most non-IT people.
The login page is on https://provide-journey-contact-details.auth.eu-west-1.amazoncognito.com/ which looks like some 3rd party login service. Well, the UK Govt IT services are not capable of implementing a login page!
Also if you let the browser remember the password, you have to do a password reset every time you go it, which adds about half an hour. This seems to be because their login verification process presents both your email and your mobile number to the browser as a username, so it saves one and then saves the other over the top of it.
I have made a pilot of screenshots as proof of the problems for the police in case they harrass me, and emailed the above to the “tech issues” contact email
How can a government be so incompetent? Their budgets are huge. But their expertise seems to be limited to churning out web pages in 24pt font – presumably because if they did anything more readable they would get complaints from the 1000 charities representing blind people. So they must be working to some 1000 page “accessibility” manual, while losing the plot on the most basic things.
The UK is about to massively tighten the law on travelling abroad. Currently there is no law preventing this; only guidance. The law is regarding leaving your home without a reasonable excuse (but the whole country is doing that anyway) and there is the mandatory quarantine when you return. This is coming soon:
to visit a dying relative or close friend
I don’t know, but the lack of a repeat of the word “dying” before “close friend” leaves a lot of scope for interpretation!
It could easily be read as:
To visit a :
1. dying relative, or
2. close friend.
“no one may “leave England….”
“to the common travel area of the Channel Islands, Isle of Man and the Republic of Ireland”
Interesting. No mention of travel to Wales or Scotland. I await the wording of the likely Scottish equivalent Law regarding leaving Scotland.
Will Jacko be arrested if he lands at Kirkbride and is suspected of intending to fly back to Glenswinton?
Does this mean the £5000 fine if one leaves UK airspace without any intention of landing abroad?
Restrictions on leaving the United Kingdom
8. (1) No person may, without a reasonable excuse
(a) leave England to travel to a destination outside the United Kingdom, or
(b) travel to, or be present at, an embarkation point for the purpose of travelling from there to
a destination outside the United Kingdom.
Is a “destination” on land? For example can one fly an instrument approach in France?
But what are the exemptions? Pretty sure I saw something about CTA and family on the news earlier, but it was vague…
I understand you may leave to travel to another home abroad. (Described as the Stanley Johnson clause)
The way the are reporting the ‘Stanley Johnson clause’ is somewhat disingenuous.
You cannot travel just because you have such a property, i.e. to stay in it. You may travel to undertake activities related to buying/selling/renting. This is actually perfectly reasonable when you think about it – if you have a property which might be costing you money then you need to be able to take care of business rather than being required to let it rot. Same logic as engine health flights or Peter’s ‘the horse must starve’ example.
Of course it is open to abuse (you spend a week there on holiday and claim you were ‘preparing it for rental’) but lots of things are open to abuse and there’s not a great deal that can realistically be done about it.
The media portrays it as an ‘if you’re rich you are exempt’ rule but it isn’t really that at all.
What’s stopping you from doing “Peter trick”? I mean you take off at EGKA, your destination is EGKA. You flying to EGKA from EGKA via, I don’t know, Italy? Or France?
Its not prohibited as I read it.
