UK has chartered just six flights via an EU scheme compared with 101 fights bringing home German nationals

Four in 10 of the 165,000 Europeans stranded around the world amid the pandemic are UK nationals but the British government has organised fewer EU-funded emergency flights than any other major country apart from Italy, the Guardian can reveal.

The UK has chartered just six flights via the EU crisis scheme, bringing 1,000 Britons home. Germany, in comparison, has organised 101 such flights through the programme, repatriating a total of 21,815 of its citizens with EU cash.

About 65,000 UK nationals around the world are still in need of repatriation compared to “several thousand” German nationals, according to figures obtained by the Guardian.

A Foreign Office spokesman did not deny the accuracy of the data, which was shared by the UK with foreign consulates earlier this week.

The shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, said the numbers raised questions over the British government’s repatriation policy. “The UK’s reliance on commercial airlines has left far too many British citizens stranded abroad, with many concerned about running out of money or medication and increasingly anxious about how they will get home.”

She said she had been “overwhelmed with appeals for help from Britons”, some of whom had lost thousands of pounds on cancelled flights. Their plight underlined the need, she said, for an interim foreign secretary to be appointed to enable urgent decisions to be taken about the charter flights.



“FCO staff are doing their best but there are decisions to be taken, in real time, to support those British citizens who feel they have been abandoned at a time of great need,” she said.

On Thursday the German embassy confirmed it had repatriated 60,000 citizens – up from 42,000 two weeks ago – on 240 charter flights, compared to “more than 2,800” British citizens cited by the UK foreign minister James Cleverly on a recent Twitter update.

James Cleverly (@JamesCleverly) Important information for British nationals who are currently abroad 👇 pic.twitter.com/HtGdm701Hr

Adrienne Newton, a retried GP, who has been stranded in Argentina for a month, said she has lost faith in the British government after the embassy rang her and said there were 300 people stranded but no plans for charter flights.

She said: “The British government in Argentina is only notable by its absence and it has left us reeling. I don’t feel safe in the government’s hands any more. Last week there were flights organised by France to Paris and Amsterdam, by Spain to Madrid. Iberia has another flight to Madrid tomorrow while Germany has another flight to Frankfurt and Switzerland has one to Zurich on Saturday. And what is our government doing? Nothing, it is embarrassing.”

She had now resorted, she said, to begging other embassies for a seat on their flights; they had all responded “personally” with emails to say their flights were full.

The government has been severely criticised by MPs and constituents for the failure to act like other EU countries towards its own citizens in the face of a pandemic.

It was only on 30 March that the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, two weeks after many countries had locked down, announced a £75m effort to repatriate hundreds of thousands of British.

Under the EU’s civil protection mechanism established in 2001 participating countries can recuperate, from the EU budget, 75% of the costs of organising emergency flights during times of natural disaster.

The six flights organised by the UK under the scheme took place in February and March carrying 1,125 Britons. Four of the flights were from Lima, Peru, and one each was chartered to transport people from the cities of Oakland in California, and Tokyo.

The flights also took home 122 EU nationals from Ireland, Germany, Romania, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, France, Latvia, Lithuania and Belgium.

A further 672 UK nationals have been returned home on flights organised by other countries.

Raab has also agreed to a weekly meeting with the foreign minister Nigel Adams, other MPs and Nandy, who have complained about the lack of rescue flights. Sources said the first meeting was “very useful”.

Participants in this civil protection mechanism are the 27 EU member states, the UK and six “participating states”, namely Iceland, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia and Turkey.

Explaining the relatively low number of flights organised by the UK, sources said it was a condition of the mechanism that seats should be made available on flights to EU nationals but that this was not always possible given the number of Britons in need of rescue. The mechanism is also supposed to be used as a last resort.

These conditions have not stopped Germany flying its nationals back from all around the world, including from Bali, Brisbane, Sydney, Islamabad, Mumbai and Mexico City.

Germany, which had an estimated 250,000 nationals affected by the travel lockdowns, of which about 50,000 were stranded, is by far the biggest user of the EU mechanism, ahead of France (18 flights), the Czech Republic (13), Spain (11) and Belgium (8). A total of 43,584 stranded people have been repatriated with EU funds.

The UK has faced an uphill battle getting its citizens back but about 1.3 million Britons have returned home since the outbreak began.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “The UK has activated the civil protection mechanism on several occasions, as part of our international response to coronavirus, which helped repatriate British nationals and EU citizens.”

• The headline of this article was amended on 22 April 2020 to more accurately reflect that the flights which were the main subject of this article were EU-funded.