Ministers don’t know if ?486m pandemic traffic light system worked, say MPs

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At least ?486m of taxpayer funds were spent on implementing the “traffic light system” for international arrivals during the coronavirus pandemic. But the government “does not know” whether it worked or not, according to a powerful committee of MPs.

The traffic light system set the rules for arrivals from every country depending on whether it was on the red, amber or green list. Arrivals from red list countries had to stay in a quarantine hotel for at least 10 days.

The testing and quarantine requirements for people arriving in the UK were changed 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022, according to the report by the public accounts committee (PAC) published on Tuesday.

The report said the government “does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”.

Airlines and holiday companies blamed ministers for the slow recovery of foreign travel due to the rules, with many European countries imposing fewer restrictions.

“Managing cross-border travel was an essential part of health measures introduced by government during the pandemic,” the report said. “Despite spending at least ?486m on implementing its traffic light system to manage travel, [the] government did not track its spending on managing cross-border travel or set clear objectives, so does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused.”

Taxpayers subsidised ?329m of the total ?757m cost of quarantine hotels, according to the report. That is despite the bill for individuals rising to more than ?2,200 for a single adult. Only 2% of guests in hotel quarantine tested positive.

Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the PAC, 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.”

Hillier said the government was not learning the lessons from the pandemic fast enough, missing opportunities to react faster to new variants and the spread of monkeypox.

“We don’t have time and it is not enough for government to feed these failures into its delayed public inquiry,” she said.

The Cabinet Office, which devised the scheme, said the pandemic was an unprecedented challenge and it acted “swiftly and decisively” to implement policies designed to save lives and protect the NHS from being overwhelmed.

A UK government spokesperson said: “Our top priority was public health, and considerable efforts were made across government to put border measures in place that helped to protect the UK from arriving cases of Covid-19, buying vital time for our domestic response to new and concerning variants.

“The Covid-19 inquiry has been set up to examine the UK’s response to the pandemic and the government will meet its obligations to the inquiry in full.”