The UK government’s traffic light system for managing international travel during the pandemic has been criticised for causing “huge confusion and disruption”, as well as “blowing” huge amounts of money on ineffective measures.
The House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee said the government still “does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”, despite spending £486 million on the traffic light regime.
MPs on the committee also hit out at the government’s mandatory quarantine hotel service, which had to be subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of £329 million, even though it was meant to be self-funding through travellers’ payments. They also pointed out that only two per cent of quarantined guests tested positive for Covid.
The government changed the travel rules at least 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022, but the committee said the travel industry was given “little time to adapt”. Communication with the public about the changes was also poor, with 40 per cent of people unaware of the rules on self-isolation.
Labour MP Meg Hillier, who chairs the 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.”
The committee also criticised the government’s failure to “properly set up” the market for buying Covid travel tests, which meant travellers were exposed to the “risk of fraud and poor quality of service”.
Hillier called for the government to learn from these mistakes quickly before the next health crisis emerges.
“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,” she added.
Clive Wratten, CEO of the Business Travel Association, said: “Frictionless travel is vital if the UK economy is to trade effectively, and it is galling to hear that the effects of the government’s constantly changing travel restrictions are unclear.
“By taking this contested approach, the government caused long lasting damage to the business travel sector and drove an exodus of skilled talent from it.”