Committee says government does not know if pandemic travel “traffic light system” worked

In a report today the Public Accounts Committee says despite spending at least £486 million on implementing the international travel “traffic light system” during the pandemic, Government “does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”.

Government changed the travel rules at least 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022, but gave the travel industry little time to adapt. It relied on private sector travel carriers to implement checks on additional health documentation but despite this key role and the costs incurred gave them no specific additional support.

The Government relied on the public to understand and comply with what was required of them, but “did not clearly communicate changes to either carriers or the public”. Some 40% of people were aware of the rules on self-isolation.

Government also does not know the impact on public health of the estimated 2.5 million exemptions given to select groups from some of the requirements, or how many of them tested positive for COVID-19. In not setting out the reasons for exemptions for those attending Euro 2020 and London Fashion Week, Government risked undermining “people’s willingness to comply with rules”. 

The taxpayer subsidised £329 million of the total £757 million quarantine service cost, though it was meant to be self-funding with the rest passed to people travelling. This was despite the cost to individuals increasing to more than £2,200 for a single adult over 10 days in August 2021. Only 2% of hotel quarantined guests tested positive.

The Committee also says DHSC’s “failure to properly set up the market for travel tests put the public at risk of fraud and poor quality of service”. It also failed to adequately protect the taxpayer from fraud in the Managed Quarantine Service or pursue the “substantial” fraud that has occurred. Despite the £100 million cost of contracts for home visits, approximately one-third of people may not have complied with requirements to isolate at home.

Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: “The approach to border controls and quarantine caused huge confusion and disruption with 10 changes in a year. And now we can see that it is not clear what this achieved.

“We can be clear on one thing – the cost to the taxpayer in subsidising expensive quarantine hotels, and more millions of taxpayers’ money blown on measures with no apparent plan or reasoning and precious few checks or proof that it was working to protect public health.

“We don’t have time and it is not enough for Government to feed these failures into its delayed public inquiry – it is not learning lessons fast enough from the pandemic and is missing opportunities to react quickly to future emergencies or even current events like new variants of Covid or the spread of Monkeypox.”

 PAC report conclusions and recommendations: 

6. Government is not learning lessons fast enough from the pandemic and is missing opportunities to react quickly to future emergencies. Since it began to introduce the traffic light system in early 2021, government has been working in a crisis-response mode, with limited time for officials to implement the health measures. We acknowledge that a reactive, fast-paced approach to new and emerging issues was necessary at the start of the pandemic, but government should have moved to a more systematic approach sooner. It took two days to reactivate the Managed Quarantine Service (MQS) to respond to the omicron variant of COVID-19, which meant potentially infectious people were allowed to quarantine at home instead. Now government has stood the service down it may take longer to reintroduce if needed again. In the longer term, health measures may be needed to deal with new variants of COVID-19 or other diseases such as monkeypox, so government needs to ensure it is able to respond quickly. Despite collecting some 200,000 documents about how health measures were introduced, the Cabinet Office’s approach still appears to be reactive and largely focused on preparing for the public inquiry rather than on learning lessons for tackling future health threats. Government did not take minutes of meetings of working groups supporting ministers and we are concerned that institutional memory may be lost by the time of the next crisis, with members of the COVID-19 taskforce having already moved onto other work.

Recommendation: The Cabinet Office, before the start of the public inquiry, should capture and disseminate lessons for operational delivery in a format accessible to future generations, and publish how departments would re-introduce health measures in response to future health threats if needed. 

7. 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.  

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 the expected costs at the outset; and 
• A requirement to amend and update assessments as the situation changes, for instance if demand for services diverges from what was expected. 

8. 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. 

9. 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. 

10. 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.  

11. DHSC failed to adequately protect the taxpayer from fraud in the Managed Quarantine Service (MQS), and is not pursuing the fraud that it has identified vigorously enough. There was substantial fraud against the MQS programme. At 1 March 2022, DHSC was owed £74 million in unpaid bills. This includes £21 million of refunds issued but DHSC does not know how much of these were fraudulent and how much was from people who were not satisfied with the service they had paid for. DHSC has only investigated two cases of fraud and has shown limited interest in pursuing more, citing the small amount of money involved in individual cases. Between February 2021 and September 2021 people could self-certify that they were suffering financial hardship to avoid paying upfront. But DHSC also does not know to what extent its system for claiming financial hardship was abused. By May 2022, DHSC has recovered, or has plans to recover, £20 million of £54 million of debt from people using the hardship scheme.    

Recommendation: DHSC should write to the Committee as part of its Treasury Minute response setting out: 

• how much of the fraud and unpaid MQS bills it has recovered, how much it has written off, and how it plans to recover the outstanding amount;  
• how much of the outstanding amount is due to fraud, unpaid hardship plans and other reasons; 
• how much of the debts arising from the hardship plan are owed by people who self-certified hardship; 
• how much it has spent collecting unpaid MQS bills; and 
• how many fraud cases it has identified, investigated and successfully prosecuted. 

12. The Cabinet Office failed to bring together how risks were identified and managed across the portfolio of programmes for implementing health measures at the border. We have repeatedly found that the pandemic has exposed limitations in how government manages risks, especially those that cut across institutional boundaries. Government organised its cross-border travel measures as a portfolio of seven separate programmes across separate departments with central coordination, rather than as one cross-government programme. There was no central governance or oversight of the portfolio, and we are not convinced that the Cabinet Office adequately ensured that the portfolio and its constituent programmes balanced the competing objectives of protecting health and protecting the economy. And we are not convinced that the Cabinet Office applied the principles of risk management, that are set out in the government’s Orange Book, to the traffic light system. In accordance with good practice, we would expect to see data dashboards and risk registers that bring together the risks from the various departmental programmes in one place to inform ministerial decision-making.  

Recommendation: The Cabinet Office should produce, within six months, guidance to accompany the Orange Book setting out how cross-government portfolios of programmes should aggregate and manage risks at a portfolio-level so that effective whole-system governance processes are in place.  

To the same timescale, it should review whether other cross-government portfolios have effective whole-system governance and risk management processes in place.

ENDS 

Full details of the inquiry including evidence received (under “Publications) can be found here: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/6677/managing-crossborder-travel-during-the-covid19-pandemic/