Taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of pounds subsidising the government’s “hotel quarantine” scheme – with no certainty that it did any good.
The Independent has analysed a damning report by MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the government’s international travel restrictions aimed at combatting Covid-19.
The report – Managing cross-border travel during the Covid-19 pandemic – reveals apparent multi-million-pound frauds perpetrated by arrivals from red-list countries.
The all-party committee also accuses the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) of allowing UK travellers to be ripped off by unscrupulous testing organisations.
Hotel quarantine was introduced in February 2021. The controversial requirement for travellers from “red list” countries to spend 11 nights in an airport hotel remained in place for a constantly shifting cohort of countries, sometimes numbering over 50, until December 2021.
In all, 214,000 travellers paid up to £2,285 each towards their stay. But the average cost was £3,537 – leaving a total shortfall of £329m to be met by the taxpayer, or over £1m daily.
DHSC sources say that towards the end of the scheme very few travellers were in hotel quarantine, raising the average cost significantly.
The committee also says: “DHSC failed to adequately protect the taxpayer from fraud in the Managed Quarantine Service (MQS), and is not pursuing the fraud that it has identified vigorously enough.
“There was substantial fraud against the MQS programme. At 1 March 2022, DHSC was owed £74 million in unpaid bills. This includes £21 million of refunds issued but DHSC does not know how much of these were fraudulent.”
A number of people who were in hotel quarantine later secured “chargeback” refunds from their credit card companies, who in turn claimed the money back from the government.
The Independent understands that cases where a booking was subject to a chargeback have been referred to Qualco, DHSC’s debt collection agency – though sources said that where fraud has involved travellers based abroad, it may not be possible to recover the funds.
Between February and September 2021 people could self-certify that they were suffering financial hardship to avoid paying upfront for hotel quarantine.
The report says: “DHSC also does not know to what extent its system for claiming financial hardship was abused.
“By May 2022, DHSC has recovered, or has plans to recover, £20m of £54m of debt from people using the hardship scheme.”
Looking more broadly at the UK’s travel restrictions, which were more onerous than other major European countries, the report condemns the government for failing to set clear objectives or track its spending on managing cross-border travel. Ministers do not know “whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”.
The MPs say: “We are concerned that government did not attempt to measure whether its health measures were successful, particularly as research commissioned by the airport industry suggested health measures only delayed the peak in the number of cases from new variants by seven days”.
Dame Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “The approach to border controls and quarantine caused huge confusion and disruption with 10 changes in a year. And now we can see that it is not clear what this achieved.
“We can be clear on one thing – the cost to the taxpayer in subsidising expensive quarantine hotels, and more millions of taxpayers’ money blown on measures with no apparent plan or reasoning and precious few checks or proof that it was working to protect public health.”
Commenting on the report on LBC Radio, easyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren said: “The traffic light system had no meaningful impact on the spread of Covid infections.
“They were introduced with no scientific evidence that they would be working.”
An earlier report by the Transport Select Committee concluded: “There is no evidence that the requirement for travellers from certain countries to quarantine at a hotel, rather than at a location of their choice, has improved the UK’s coronavirus situation compared with other European countries.
“As international travel restarted in the summer of 2021, the industry, its workforce and passengers were subjected to a traffic light system that was opaque, ambiguous and inconsistent.”
The PAC concurs that the parameters used for decisions were unclear.
“Government did not publish information about how it had assessed the risk of travelling to different countries, making it difficult for people to plan or to pre-empt what changes might be made,” the report says.
A government spokesperson said: “The pandemic was an unprecedented challenge and we acted swiftly and decisively to implement policies designed to save lives and protect the NHS from being overwhelmed.
“Our top priority was public health and considerable efforts were made across government to put border measures in place that helped to protect the UK from arriving cases of Covid-19, buying vital time for our domestic response to new and concerning variants.”
The Public Accounts Committee believes one in three travellers who were supposed to be quarantining at home may have breached rules, saying: “Despite the Home Office and DHSC spending over £100m on contracts for home visits to check compliance, approximately one-third of people may not have complied with requirements to isolate at home, and only 0.32 per cent [around one in 300] of all home visits were referred to the police.
“[Government] departments have failed to protect the taxpayer, and the public, from the risk of fraud and poor quality of service from providers of Covid-19 tests for people travelling to the UK, or to vigorously pursue the fraud that has occurred.”
The committee also criticises the DHSC’s “failure to properly set up the market for travel tests put the public at risk of fraud and poor quality of service”.
The report says: “We are deeply concerned that so many companies were listed on gov.uk, giving the impression that they had been approved by government when in reality they may not have met the required standards.”
The government spokesperson said: “The Covid-19 Inquiry has been set up to examine the UK’s response to the pandemic and the government will meet its obligations to the Inquiry in full.”
The government has two months to respond formally to the PAC report.
