Kate Garraway has revealed her husband Derek Draper was trapped in certainly one of Heathrow Airport’s new disabled passport scanners for “an hour”.
Former political adviser Mr Draper, 56, contracted Covid-19 in 2020 and suffered critical problems, spending months in hospital and now, years later, nonetheless requiring full-time care.
Draper, who shares two youngsters with Good Morning Britain presenter Garraway, 56, now makes use of a wheelchair and has little or no power in his arms, and the problems have additionally affected his cognition and speech.
While travelling again from the United States of America, the place Draper had been for remedy, he used Heathrow’s disabled passport scanners.
The new set up was created particularly to permit wheelchair customers to undergo the self-scanners, an “achievement” that the airport was celebrating, as beforehand they’d not have been extensive sufficient to permit them in.
However, all didn’t go to plan as Draper was locked in and trapped for an hour.
Discussing the incident on Wednesday’s episode of Good Morning Britain, Garraway defined: “Heathrow was celebrating, they put in a new wheelchair-width… passport scanner.
“Before then you couldn’t get a wheelchair through. They put one in at vast expense, but when it came to do it with Derek – disability has a wide range, he hasn’t got the cognition you’ve got or the strength you’ve got in your upper body – we realised we couldn’t get him into the country.
“He went forward, the door locked, but the disabled person has to free it and you’re not allowed, because of the border, to do it yourself. So he was stuck in no man’s land, literally between two borders, for an hour or so.
“So even when conscious effort has been made to make things work, and I wonder if it’s because there aren’t enough disabled people talking about it.”
