Recommendation 2

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