At least £486m of taxpayers’ money was spent on implementing the ‘traffic light system’ for international arrivals during the coronavirus pandemic. But the government “does not know” whether it worked or not, according to a powerful committee of MPs.
The traffic light system marked the rules for the arrivals of each country according to whether it was on the red, amber or green list. Arrivals from red-listed countries had to stay in a quarantine hotel for at least 10 days.
Testing and quarantine requirements for people arriving in the UK were changed 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022, according to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report published on Tuesday.
The report said the government “does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”.
Airlines and holiday companies blamed ministers for the slow recovery in overseas travel due to the rules, with many European countries imposing fewer restrictions.
“The management of cross-border travel was an essential part of the health measures introduced by the government during the pandemic,” the report said. “Despite spending at least £486m implementing its traffic light system to manage journeys, [the] The government didn’t track its spending on managing cross-border travel or set clear targets, so it doesn’t know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption it caused.”
According to the report, taxpayers subsidized £329 million of the total £757 million cost of quarantine hotels. This is despite the bill for people rising to more than £2,200 for a single adult. Only 2% of guests in hotel quarantine tested positive.
Dame Meg Hillier, chair of PAC, said: “The approach to border controls and quarantine caused huge confusion and disruption with 10 changes in one year. And we can now see that it is not clear what this achieved.
“We can be clear about one thing: the cost to the taxpayer of subsidizing expensive quarantine hotels, and millions more of taxpayers’ money being pumped into measures with no apparent plan or reasoning and precious few checks or evidence that worked to protect health public.”
Hillier said the government was not learning the lessons of the pandemic fast enough, missing opportunities to react more quickly to new variants and the spread of monkeypox.
“We don’t have time and not enough of the government to fuel these failures in their overdue public inquiry,” he said.
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The Cabinet Office, which came up with the scheme, said the pandemic was an unprecedented challenge and it acted “quickly and decisively” to implement policies designed to save lives and protect the NHS from being overwhelmed.
A UK Government spokesman said: “Our top priority was public health and considerable efforts were made across government to put in place border measures to help protect the UK from the arrival of Covid cases -19, gaining vital time for our domestic response to new cases and on 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 with the inquiry in full.”