Recommendation 3

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.