Red list hotel quarantine subsidised by over £1m a day by taxpayers – and ‘no evidence’ that it worked

Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calder’s Travel email Get Simon Calder’s Travel email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “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. “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. “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 of all home visits were referred to the police. “ 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”.