Recommendation 20

The largest part of government’s spending on COVID-19 border measures was on the MQS, which cost the taxpayer £329 million. This is after the recovery of £428 million from guests paying for their accommodation and tests. In total, the service cost £757 million.34 DHSC explained that it originally intended to recover, where possible, the full cost of 29 Q 128; C&AG’s Report para2 2.14–2.15 30 UKAS, C19-Stage2 UKAS Appraisal, https://www.ukas.com/c19-stage2-ukas-appraisal/; C&AG’s report para 2.15 31 Qq 124–125, 127–128; C&AG’s report para 2.15 32 C&AG’s Report para 13, 2.16–2.17 33 Qq 125, 129, 145–6 34 Qq 87, 89, C&AG’s report Figure 12, para 2.33 16 Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic managed quarantine from the people who had used it. It expected to charge people using the service £1,750, for one person quarantining for 10 days, but decided to raise this to £2,285 in August 2021. DHSC explained that the original cost was set using internal cost analysis as DHSC considered it was not possible to benchmark the cost against quarantine systems in other countries. The percentage of passengers arriving in the UK from red list countries fell from 4% in July 2021 to 1% in August 2021. DHSC said that, once countries were removed from the red list, the number of people required to quarantine in hotels fell, and ministers decided that to continue to recover the costs from people quarantining it would have needed to raise the cost per person to unreasonably high levels.35 DHSC considered that the amount spent on the MQS was value for money, as the percentage of people in the MQS testing positive was higher than the rate in the overall population. DHSC also said that it had designed the system to minimise the number of people choosing to travel from high-risk countries to the UK. But between February and December 2021, only 2% of quarantine guests tested positive, which only rose to 6% during the early stages of the omicron wave.36 Protecting the taxpayer