The UK Government has admitted that it is unsure whether various safeguards it put in place in response to the Covid-19 outbreak - including the ‘travel traffic light system’, hotel quarantine measures or ordering people to isolate at home - actually worked.
In a report published on Tuesday, the Public Accounts Committee has found that despite spending at least £486 million on implementing its traffic light system for international travel during the pandemic, the government “does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”. To get the latest WalesOnline newsletters e-mailed to you directly for free, click here.
Travel rules were changed at least 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022, but the report found that the travel industry had little to adapt to those changes, and instead people within the industry had to rely on private sector travel carriers to implement checks, while the government “did not clearly communicate changes to either carriers or the public”, and instead relied on people to understand and comply with what was required of them.
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It has also been found that the taxpayer subsidised £329 million of the total £757 million quarantine service cost, though it was meant to be self-funding with the rest passed to people travelling. This was despite the cost to individuals increasing to more than £2,200 for a single adult over 10 days in August 2021, and the fact that only 2% of hotel quarantined guests tested positive.
The Public Accounts Committee also said that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) showed a “failure to properly set up the market for travel tests put the public at risk of fraud and poor quality of service”, and that, despite the £100 million cost of contracts for home visits, approximately one-third of people may not have complied with requirements to isolate at home.
“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,” said Dame Meg Hillier MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee. “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.
“We don’t have time and it is not enough for Government to feed these failures into its delayed public inquiry - it is not learning lessons fast enough from the pandemic and is missing opportunities to react quickly to future emergencies or even current events like new variants of Covid or the spread of Monkeypox.”
The key findings made by the committee say that:
- The government is not learning lessons fast enough from the pandemic and is missing opportunities to react quickly to future emergencies
- Government does not know whether it achieved value for money from the £486 million that it spent implementing measures
- Government’s failure to communicate the reasons for frequent changes to health measures made it hard for the public to understand and adhere to them
- Government did not strike the right balance between its reliance on the travel industry to implement travel controls and the support it provided
- The Department for Health & Social Care’s failure to properly set up the market for travel tests put the public at risk of fraud and poor quality of service
- 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
Tuesday’s report, which is 27 pages long in total, states: “Managing cross-border travel was an essential part of health measures introduced by government during the pandemic. Despite spending at least £486 million on implementing its traffic light system to manage travel during the pandemic, government did not track its spending on managing cross-border travel or set clear objectives, so does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused. Similarly, its failure to develop good data to inform its decisions means it does not know the impact on public health of granting 2.5 million exemptions from parts of the system.”
It goes on to say: “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. It is not enough for Departments just to gather evidence from implementation of these measures to feed into the public inquiry. As we have repeatedly observed, it is essential that departments learn lessons in order to manage effectively large cross-government portfolios in future and respond to any future emergencies.”
When asked to comment on the report, a UK 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 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.”
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