Sixteenth Report - Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic

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 … Read more 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 Show less

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The Department for Health & Social Care’s failure to properly set up the market for travel tests put the public at risk of fraud and poor quality of service. DHSC required companies looking to conduct tests to be accredited by … Read more The Department for Health & Social Care’s failure to properly set up the market for travel tests put the public at risk of fraud and poor quality of service. DHSC required companies looking to conduct tests to be accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service. The first stage of this process only requires a self-declaration that companies meet DHSC’s minimum standards, but DHSC allowed companies making that declaration to be listed on gov.uk as providers of tests to the public. But 95% of companies failed the second stage of accreditation, which required providers to submit evidence to the accreditor, at their first attempt. By 28 January 2022, DHSC had removed 264 providers from gov.uk, 111 of which were removed because they had failed their second or third stage accreditation. We are deeply concerned that so many companies were listed on gov.uk, giving the impression that they had been approved by government when in reality they may not have met the required standards. Despite the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) warning of a “race to the bottom”, where the market competed on price alone, DHSC did not include any information about service quality on the gov.uk site. It similarly failed to respond formally to the CMA’s suggestions for improvement in April, May and September 2021. Recommendation: DHSC should set out, as part of its Treasury Minute response, why it did not take on board the CMA’s recommendations on the testing market, and which recommendations it would implement if health measures were re- introduced. Show less

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The NAO found that government had limited data on the impact of the exemptions and as a result it did not know how frequently exemptions were used, how many people with exemptions tested positive, or whether the number of exemptions was proportionate to the risk presented. We asked whether government …

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We asked DfT why government granted exemptions for one-off events such as Euro 2020, London Fashion Week and the COP 26 summit. It said that government had put in place bespoke measures to reduce the risk of transmission at these events. For example, it explained that COP 26 attendees had …

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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 …

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We asked about the experience of guests in quarantine hotels and what had been done to safeguard people staying in the MQS. DHSC told us that it had put a great deal of effort into making sure that hotels were a safe environment for all those staying in them. It …

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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 …

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The airport industry commissioned its own research into the costs and benefits of travel restrictions which found that, had there been no travel restrictions in place during November and December 2021, the peak in omicron cases would have occurred only seven days earlier and would have been 8 per cent …

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The NAO reported that the circumstances in which government had to implement the traffic light system had often been a crisis response requiring government to move at pace.49 The Cabinet Office explained that the system was a response to the then concern about vaccine-evading variants of COVID-19. We observed that …

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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, …

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