Recommendation 26

In addition to not tracking costs, government did not formally set out what it regarded as successful implementation of the cross-border travel measures, nor its measurement of success.45 We therefore asked the Cabinet Office how it knew whether measures were effective and how it would determine whether they had been a success. The Cabinet Office recognised that measuring effectiveness was “one of the challenges of the overall covid response … [as] it is difficult to isolate the effects of one of a number of interventions from the other ones”. It told us that it had attempted to measure the impact of the controls and had identified 12,000 cases of people who tested positive in the MQS who had come from red-listed countries, which it asserted was “a lot of people who would have been going out across the UK, inflecting other people and spreading these variants of concern, which the public was protected from”. When asked if it considered this a success, the Cabinet Office told us that it was not possible to say that whether this was a unique impact of the cross-border travel measures, but that from the point at which restrictions were introduced, the additional impact of people travelling and spreading covid “seems to have been controlled”. It explained that the general view from health authorities was that the measures had been important in trying to slow down the spread of infections.46