At least £486 million of taxpayers’ money was spent on implementation of “traffic light system” for international arrival during the coronavirus pandemic. But government “not know“regardless of whether it worked or not, according to powerful Committee of deputies.
Traffic light system set in rules for arrival from each country depending on was it on red, amber or green list. Arrival from red list countries had to stay in quarantine hotel for at least 10 days.
Testing and quarantine requirements for people arrival in Great Britain was changed ten times between February 2021 and January 2022, according to the report public Accounts Committee (PAC) published on Tuesday.
The report says government “not know whether system worked or cost was worth violation caused”.
Airlines and holiday companies accused the ministers for slow recovery of travel abroad due to rules, with many European countries introducing fewer restrictions.
“Managing cross-border travel has been an important part of of sanitary measures introduced government during a pandemic,” the statement said. “Even though they spent at least £486m, on implementation of your traffic light system manage travel, [the] government didn’t keep track of my spending on cross-border travel management or set clear goals, so know whether system worked or cost was worth violation caused”.
Taxpayers subsidized £329m of in total £757 million cost of quarantine hotels, the report said. This despite the bill for faces rising to more than £2200 for lonely adult. Only 2% of guests in The quarantine at the hotel gave a positive result.
Dame Meg Hillier, Chairman of PKK, said: “Approach to the border controls and quarantine caused great confusion and confusion with ten changes in a year. And now we see that it’s not clear what it has achieved.
“We can be clear on one thing is cost taxpayer in subsidizing expensive quarantine hotels and more millions of taxpayers money blown up on measures with no obvious plan or reasoning and very little verification or evidence that it works to protect public health.”
Hiller said that government did not learn from the pandemic fast enough, missing out on opportunities to respond quickly to new variants and distribution of monkeypox.
“We don’t have time and not enough for government to feed these failures to your delayed public investigation,” she said.
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The cabinet that developed the scheme said the pandemic was unprecedented. challenge and he acted “quickly and decisively” to implement the policy designed to save lives and protect the NHS from being overwhelmed.
Great Britain government the spokesman said: “Our top priority was public health, and considerable efforts were made through government impose border measures in place who helped protect the UK from incoming cases of Covid-19 buying vital time for our internal response to new and about options.
“The Covid-19 investigation was set up study the UK’s response to the pandemic and government fulfill its obligations to the request in full”.
