The travel industry had "many months" to hire the staff it needs to cope with an increase in demand but failed to do so, a government minister has said.

       Lord Stephen Parkinson, an arts minister, said the Department for Transport had spent months warning the travel sector about the need to prepare for a spike in demand following the coronavirus pandemic.

       He said the Government had warned there would be a significant increase in the number of people looking to go away on holiday, particularly during the half-term break and Jubilee weekend, but the industry had not recruited enough people to cope.

       "So we have been saying to the industry that they need to prepare for this, they need to have the staff that they need to make sure people can get away and enjoy holidays," Lord Parkinson told Sky News.

       "There has been many months where we have been back on the track, particularly since the vaccination, to this moment and the industry should have been recruiting people."

       He added: "Colleagues in the Department for Transport are working with the industry, we have been for many months, urging them to make sure they have got enough staff... it is causing a lot of stress for people, particularly in half term, people with family and children with them, it is very distressing if you turn up at the airport and your flight isn’t ready."

       However, Andy Prendergast, the national secretary of the GMB Union, told the BBC that recruiting staff had become almost impossible, as many of those laid off during the pandemic had found other jobs and were now unwilling to come back.

       "In the decade before that we saw huge cost cutting in airports, pressure to drive wages down," he said. "[The] allure of industry has disappeared - it's not solid steady work."

       Mr Prendergast also said people were "expecting a new variant to pull rug under them at any moment" and that this had driven them to seek work elsewhere.

       Peter Davies, the chief executive of the Airline Management Group, said that "mismanagement" by both the airlines and the airports was exacerbating the problem.

       "The airlines are exacerbating the situation by asking people to turn up at the airports early," he told LBC.