Recommendations & Conclusions
15 items
2
Recommendation
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
Government does not know whether it achieved value for money from the £486 million that it spent implementing measures. Government did not track spending on implementing health measures, but the National Audit Office estimated that, across the five Departments involved, government spent £486 million in 2021–22. We are concerned that …
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Government does not know whether it achieved value for money from the £486 million that it spent implementing measures. Government did not track spending on implementing health measures, but the National Audit Office estimated that, across the five Departments involved, government spent £486 million in 2021–22. 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. People travelling from red-list countries had to stay in hotels provided by the MQS, and the rate at which people in quarantine hotels were testing positive was higher than the general population. However, only 2% of quarantined guests tested positive. While the Department of Health & Social Care asserts that the service was value for money as part of the totality of health interventions against COVID-19, it could not tell us what the overall impact of quarantine hotels themselves had been, other than preventing around 12,000 cases entering the country. In total, the quarantine service cost £757 million. While it was meant to be self-funding, the taxpayer has ended up subsidising £329 million, almost half the bill, with the rest passed to people travelling. This was despite increasing the cost to individuals to more than £2,200 for a single adult over 10 days in August 2021. The number of people quarantining started to fall once countries were removed from the red list, and ministers decided that continuing to recover the full cost from people quarantining would have required raising the cost per person to unreasonably high levels. 6 Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic Recommendation: Cabinet Office, working with HM Treasury, should set out and publish, within six months, how cross-government portfolios should report and track their overall cost, including: • Setting out
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Government response AI summary
HM Treasury will consider what additional guidance should be issued to departments on how cross-government portfolios should report and track their overall cost on an ongoing basis, as part of ongoing work looking at improving joint working across government. HM Treasury will write to the …
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HM Treasury
3
Recommendation
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
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. Ministers changed the rules that people had to follow under the traffic light system at least 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022. It is, …
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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. Ministers changed the rules that people had to follow under the traffic light system at least 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022. It is, therefore, unsurprising that some 40% of people did not understand the self-isolation requirements after travel. 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. While some complexity was inevitable, we consider that frequent changes to the rules every three weeks threatened to undermine compliance. Government allowed an estimated 2.5 million people exemptions from parts of the health measures, but the Department for Transport has no data on how many people with exemptions tested positive for COVID-19. Nor did it set out the reasons for exemptions for those attending Euro 2020 and London Fashion Week. There is a risk that people’s willingness to comply with rules is undermined if different rules appear to apply to different groups. Despite the Home Office and DHSC spending over £100 million 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% of all home visits were referred to the police. Recommendation: The Cabinet Office should set out, as part of its report capturing lessons learned, what it has learned about communicating with the public effectively and what it will do differently in the future.
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees and notes key lessons learned on communicating with the public through cross-channel campaigns, including the need for agile approaches, research and feedback sessions, simple language, mutually supported communications, strategic communications, volume, clarity, timeliness, paid-for media, and communication through local, regional and national …
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HM Treasury
4
Recommendation
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
Government did not strike the right balance between its reliance on the travel industry to implement travel controls and the support it provided. Carriers were legally responsible for checking that everyone travelling to the UK had submitted a Passenger Locator Form recording their contact information and recent travel history. This …
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Government did not strike the right balance between its reliance on the travel industry to implement travel controls and the support it provided. Carriers were legally responsible for checking that everyone travelling to the UK had submitted a Passenger Locator Form recording their contact information and recent travel history. This imposed extra costs on carriers in a period where their revenue had fallen dramatically. Although government provided access to up to £8 billion of financial support during the pandemic, this was mostly general support from the furlough scheme. It did not provide any additional financial support to carriers to implement the travel controls it introduced. Despite government’s reliance on carriers, it gave them given short notice of changes to the rules and requirements to adapt their operations. Government sometimes did not provide carriers with sufficient notice ahead of public statements that the travel rules were changing because they were concerned about leaks, but details appeared in the media anyway. Recommendation: The Cabinet Office should set out, as part of its report capturing lessons learned, how it would support industry partners if health measures were reintroduced or required as part of other programmes in future. Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic 7
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation, recognising the important role that transport operators played in enabling the UK’s COVID-19 border response and the speed they had to adapt their operations to the changing situation. As part of contingency planning for future COVID-19 variants and …
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HM Treasury
6
Conclusion
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
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 …
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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 and how much was from people who were not satisfied with the service they had paid for. DHSC has only investigated two cases of fraud and has shown limited interest in pursuing more, citing the small amount of money involved in individual cases. Between February 2021 and September 2021 people could self-certify that they were suffering financial hardship to avoid paying upfront. But 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, £20 million of £54 million of debt from people using the hardship scheme. Recommendation: DHSC should write to the Committee as part of its Treasury Minute response setting out: • how much of the fraud and unpaid MQS bills it has recovered, how much it has written off, and how it plans to recover the outstanding amount; • how much of the outstanding amount is due to fraud, unpaid hardship plans and other reasons; • how much of the debts arising from the hardship plan are owed by people who self-certified hardship; • how much it has spent collecting unpaid MQS bills; and 8 Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic • how many fraud cases it has identified, investigated and successfully prosecuted.
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation and the UK Health Security Agency has already provided the Committee with a quarterly update on chargeback and hardship recoveries and the next letter will be sent by the end of September with responses to the recommendations.
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HM Treasury
7
Recommendation
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
The Cabinet Office failed to bring together how risks were identified and managed across the portfolio of programmes for implementing health measures at the border. We have repeatedly found that the pandemic has exposed limitations in how government manages risks, especially those that cut across institutional boundaries. Government organised its …
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The Cabinet Office failed to bring together how risks were identified and managed across the portfolio of programmes for implementing health measures at the border. We have repeatedly found that the pandemic has exposed limitations in how government manages risks, especially those that cut across institutional boundaries. Government organised its cross-border travel measures as a portfolio of seven separate programmes across separate departments with central coordination, rather than as one cross-government programme. There was no central governance or oversight of the portfolio, and we are not convinced that the Cabinet Office adequately ensured that the portfolio and its constituent programmes balanced the competing objectives of protecting health and protecting the economy. And we are not convinced that the Cabinet Office applied the principles of risk management, that are set out in the government’s Orange Book, to the traffic light system. In accordance with good practice, we would expect to see data dashboards and risk registers that bring together the risks from the various departmental programmes in one place to inform ministerial decision-making. Recommendation: The Cabinet Office should produce, within six months, guidance to accompany the Orange Book setting out how cross-government portfolios of programmes should aggregate and manage risks at a portfolio-level so that effective whole-system governance processes are in place. To the same timescale, it should review whether other cross-government portfolios have effective whole-system governance and risk management processes in place. Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic 9 1 Implementing cross-border travel measures
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Government response AI summary
HM Treasury will work with the Cabinet Office to develop guidance on aggregating and managing risks at a portfolio level, and undertake a review of approaches taken on some other cross-government portfolios. HM Treasury will write to the Committee with an update by January 2023.
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HM Treasury
10
Conclusion
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
From February 2021, until all travel measures were withdrawn in March 2022, private sector carriers were legally responsible for some additional document checks required as part of the travel measures. Border Force told us that the administration of some measures, notably the checking of Passenger Locator Forms, fell on the …
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From February 2021, until all travel measures were withdrawn in March 2022, private sector carriers were legally responsible for some additional document checks required as part of the travel measures. Border Force told us that the administration of some measures, notably the checking of Passenger Locator Forms, fell on the travel industry as government relied upon carriers to perform checks. It told us that it was much easier for the carriers 11 Qq 104–5, C&AG’s report paras 2.22, 2.24 12 Qq 104, 107, 109 13 Q 141; C&AG’s report paras 17, 3.11–3.14 14 Q 143; C&AG’s Report para 17 15 Qq 142–144 12 Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic to perform these checks as passenger numbers increased.16 Carriers told the NAO that these measures created significant costs for their sector at a time when their revenue had already reduced due to depressed travel volumes and that checks added significant time to boarding passengers. Air passenger numbers fell to 1% of 2019 levels in April 2020 and Home Office figures published in February 2022 showed that passenger numbers had still not returned to pre-pandemic levels by December 2021.17
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation to set out how it would support industry partners if health measures were reintroduced and will capture lessons learned through engagement with transport operators. They note the importance of regular engagement, updated guidance, and the intent to use …
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HM Treasury
11
Conclusion
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
We received written evidence from Manchester Airports Group, which told us that, if passenger numbers remained as they were when testing requirements were in place, it would cost the UK economy £16 billion per year. It also estimated that travellers had spent £365–730 million on PCR tests between 20 May …
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We received written evidence from Manchester Airports Group, which told us that, if passenger numbers remained as they were when testing requirements were in place, it would cost the UK economy £16 billion per year. It also estimated that travellers had spent £365–730 million on PCR tests between 20 May 2021 and 13 October 2021.18 We asked the Cabinet Office to what extent it had considered costs to businesses and individuals when changing the rules. The Cabinet Office told us that it did consider the costs to carriers and individuals but that it was not the biggest factor in its decision making.19
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation to set out how it would support industry partners if health measures were reintroduced and will capture lessons learned through engagement with transport operators. They note the importance of regular engagement, updated guidance, and the intent to use …
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HM Treasury
12
Conclusion
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
The NAO found that making changes at short notice in the fast-moving environment of the pandemic was inevitable, but the processes for communicating these changes to those responsible for implementing them, in advance of a public announcement, were not timely. Border Force officials, bodies representing carriers and regulators told the …
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The NAO found that making changes at short notice in the fast-moving environment of the pandemic was inevitable, but the processes for communicating these changes to those responsible for implementing them, in advance of a public announcement, were not timely. Border Force officials, bodies representing carriers and regulators told the NAO that government often announced its decisions about changing travel measures late on a Friday for implementation by Monday, giving them little time to prepare or brief front- line staff responsible for implementing those measures. In some instances, they said they received no official notice ahead of public statements, despite details sometimes appearing in the media or on Twitter.20 We asked DfT whether it had given carriers enough notice of controls being introduced. DfT said that it recognised the operational challenges of giving carriers limited notice but said it had made announcements of changes to the traffic light system more regularly than changes to the previous travel corridor system, and typically sought to provide information about changes to the traffic light system six days in advance based on a regular three-week cycle of announcements.21 Departments told the NAO that they tried to provide more notice wherever possible while avoiding information leaking, which they considered would have had a negative public health impact. DfT acknowledged that it did not provide long-term transparency over why countries moved between the red, amber and green lists, which carriers needed to run their operations.22
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation and explains what it has learned about communicating with the public effectively and what it will do differently in the future, including key lessons learned for future cross-channel campaigns.
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HM Treasury
14
Recommendation
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
In our report Government preparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic: lessons for government on risk management, we concluded that the pandemic has exposed limitations in how government manages risks, especially those that cut across institutional boundaries. We said government needs to learn lessons on leadership and oversight for whole- system risks, …
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In our report Government preparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic: lessons for government on risk management, we concluded that the pandemic has exposed limitations in how government manages risks, especially those that cut across institutional boundaries. We said government needs to learn lessons on leadership and oversight for whole- system risks, in line with the principles of the Orange Book, which sets out mandatory requirements and guidance on risk management.24 The Cabinet Office told us that health measures were not implemented as a single cross-government programme but as seven different programmes: providing public health advice, checks by Border Force officers at the border, testing, working with the travel industry, the exemptions policy, FCDO travel advice, and the DHSC’s MQS, rather than a single cross-government programme.25
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Government response AI summary
HM Treasury will work with the Cabinet Office to develop guidance, consistent with the principles-based approach in the Orange Book, on aggregating and managing risks at a portfolio level. They will also review approaches taken on some other cross-government portfolios to understand where the new …
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HM Treasury
15
Conclusion
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
The NAO found that while government implemented controls through both its committee structures and individual departmental programmes, it had not set out risks for the overall system of border measures in one place. It found that government had not adopted system-level good practice such as risk registers, regular data dashboards …
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The NAO found that while government implemented controls through both its committee structures and individual departmental programmes, it had not set out risks for the overall system of border measures in one place. It found that government had not adopted system-level good practice such as risk registers, regular data dashboards or metrics to measure and assess success so as to bring together information about cross- border travel in one place.26 We wanted to understand how the Cabinet Office had ensured the traffic light system had put good risk management or central oversight in place that would allow it to adequately balance the competing objectives of protecting the health and the economy, so we asked why the measures were not managed as a single programme with a single risk register. The Cabinet Office said that there was central government co- ordination from the COVID-19 taskforce which monitored the programmes alongside 40 other programmes that tackled COVID-19 and which needed to ‘interlink’ with each other.27
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Government response AI summary
HM Treasury will work with the Cabinet Office to develop guidance on aggregating and managing risks at a portfolio level, and undertake a review of approaches taken on some other cross-government portfolios. HM Treasury will write to the Committee with an update by January 2023.
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HM Treasury
21
Recommendation
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
As of 1 March 2022, DHSC was owed £74 million from people who had not paid for their stay in the MQS or had not paid for their PCR tests. DHSC told us that it had allowed people using the MQS to pay their bill by credit card to make …
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As of 1 March 2022, DHSC was owed £74 million from people who had not paid for their stay in the MQS or had not paid for their PCR tests. DHSC told us that it had allowed people using the MQS to pay their bill by credit card to make it easy for people to pay, in line with usual practice for hotel accommodation. Some customers have requested refunds from DHSC using the credit card chargeback regime. The NAO found that DHSC had not protected the taxpayer from fraud, including from chargebacks. Its contractor was not contractually obliged to dispute chargebacks (refunds) even when it had ground to do so. By 20 January 2022, DHSC had identified that nearly £18 million of MQS refunds issued were fraudulent.37 DHSC said that at 1 March 2022 it had received £21 million in chargeback requests but was not able to estimate how much of this was fraudulent, or how much was from people who were not satisfied with the service they had paid for. It told us that it had also found fraudulent websites offering people apparent reductions on the MQS. We asked DHSC what steps it was taking to challenge the requests for chargebacks. It told us that since June 2021 it had challenged all requests for chargebacks, and that it tried to prevent fraud by introducing basic checks that the credit card being used was under the same name as the person using the service.38
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees with the recommendation and states that the UK Health Security Agency has already provided the Committee with a quarterly update on chargeback and hardship recoveries, with the next letter to be sent by the end of September including responses to the specific …
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HM Treasury
22
Recommendation
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
By January 2022, DHSC had only investigated two fraud cases and so far had only recovered £1 million. We asked whether DHSC had published data on amounts recovered and it confirmed it had not, but agreed to provide this information to the Committee on an ongoing basis. We asked why …
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By January 2022, DHSC had only investigated two fraud cases and so far had only recovered £1 million. We asked whether DHSC had published data on amounts recovered and it confirmed it had not, but agreed to provide this information to the Committee on an ongoing basis. We asked why it had not made a more vigorous attempt to challenge those seeking to commit fraud. DHSC told us that it would “continue to go after those cases where we can” but that some cases were difficult to pursue if the culprit was overseas. It also told us that in most cases the individual amounts at stake were small and it needed to keep in mind whether the cost of recovery was greater than the benefit to the taxpayer of doing so.39 35 Q 112; C&AG’s Report Figure 6 36 Qq 87–88 37 Qq 89, 96–97; C&AGs Report paras 2.34–2.35 38 Qq 89, 92–93 39 Qq 90, 94–95; C&AG’s Report para 2.35 Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic 17
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation and UKHSA has already provided the Committee with a quarterly update on chargeback and hardship recoveries, and the next letter will be sent by the end of September with responses to the recommendations.
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HM Treasury
23
Conclusion
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
DHSC allowed people facing financial hardship to stay in quarantine hotels or buy tests without paying upfront. At 1 March 2022, DHSC was owed around £54 million from people who have not paid their bill. DHSC allowed people to self-certify financial hardship until September 2021, after which it introduced a …
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DHSC allowed people facing financial hardship to stay in quarantine hotels or buy tests without paying upfront. At 1 March 2022, DHSC was owed around £54 million from people who have not paid their bill. DHSC allowed people to self-certify financial hardship until September 2021, after which it introduced a formal process that required people to demonstrate severe financial hardship.40 It claimed that it had not been able to put more stringent requirements in place as the MQS was introduced quickly and its priority had been to ensure that the service was available. It did not know whether claims for hardship decreased after the checks on eligibility were introduced.41 The NAO reported that DHSC let a £2 million contract with Qualco to collect the debt. We asked the Department how much of the £54 million owed had been recovered and how much more it expected to recover. DHSC confirmed that it had not published any data on the amount of debt recovered but agreed to do so on an ongoing basis. It told us that, at the date of our session on 23 May 2022, it had recovered, or had arrangements in place to recover, £20 million from people using the hardship scheme.42
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Government response AI summary
The UK Health Security Agency has already provided the Committee with a quarterly update on chargeback and hardship recoveries.
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HM Treasury
25
Conclusion
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
The NAO estimated that government spent at least £486 million on cross-border travel measures in 2021–22 across the five main departments responsible for the system. Government did not track the cost of implementing cross-border travel measures. The Cabinet Office said that it considered that the border measures were not a …
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The NAO estimated that government spent at least £486 million on cross-border travel measures in 2021–22 across the five main departments responsible for the system. Government did not track the cost of implementing cross-border travel measures. The Cabinet Office said that it considered that the border measures were not a single programme, but a portfolio of programmes run by different Departments, and that individual departments had monitored their own spend against the programmes that they were responsible for.44
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Government response AI summary
HM Treasury will consider what additional guidance should be issued to departments on how cross-government portfolios should report and track their overall cost on an ongoing basis, as part of ongoing work looking at improving joint working across government. HM Treasury will write to the …
Read full response →
HM Treasury
30
Recommendation
Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-borde…
Accepted
The Cabinet Office explained that decisions about the rules were taken by the COVID-O (Operations) ministerial committee who met frequently, with support from committees and working groups of officials.56 The NAO found that supporting groups had 49 C&AG’s Report, para 1.5 50 Qq 61, 70–71 51 Qq 101–103; C&AG’s report, …
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The Cabinet Office explained that decisions about the rules were taken by the COVID-O (Operations) ministerial committee who met frequently, with support from committees and working groups of officials.56 The NAO found that supporting groups had 49 C&AG’s Report, para 1.5 50 Qq 61, 70–71 51 Qq 101–103; C&AG’s report, para 2.30 52 Committee of Public Accounts, Government preparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic: lessons for government on risk, Forty-Sixth Report of Session 2021–22, HC 952, 23 March 2022, summary, para 5 53 C&AG’s Report, para 22 54 Qq 77, 149, 153, 149 55 Qq 150, 152 56 Qq 78–83 20 Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic no formal decision-making role nor minutes. We asked witnesses how they would ensure that their lessons learned will be readable, available and accessible to future generations given that technology may have moved on when the next pandemic occurs. The Cabinet Office told us that it was collecting 200,000 documents for the upcoming public inquiry. We emphasised the importance of documents providing an honest assessment of what went right and wrong so government can improve its responses in future crises.57 57 Qq 85–86, 110, 133, 151; C&AG’s Report, para 1.9 Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic 21
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees to develop guidance on aggregating and managing risks at a portfolio level and to review existing approaches, committing to provide an update to the Committee by January 2023.
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HM Treasury