All travel restrictions were dropped on March 18, weeks after the UK government scrapped all domestic legal restrictions in late February.
In its latest report published on April 21, the National Audit Office (NAO) said the impact of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic on the UK travel industry has been “significant,” and urged the government to learn lessons in case the curbs need to be reintroduced.
The rules for border controls were changed at least 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022, the report said.
The changes in border rules were imposed by different government departments, it said, but the government “did not have an assessment bringing together all the risks across its border measures for the system as a whole.”
NAO found there was a failure to track the cost of the travel rules despite at least £486 million ($634 million) of taxpayers’ money being spent on implementing them during the 2021–2022 financial year.
The watchdog quoted the government as saying that cost had not been a factor in its implementation decisions.
“Without a set of performance measures to track effectiveness and with no evaluation of the additional costs incurred, government cannot demonstrate that its implementation measures have achieved value for money,” the report said.
Meg Hillier, a Labour MP who chairs the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, described the travel rules as “a confusing mishmash of different parts and programmes.”
“There was little evidence of a guiding mind behind its approach, and poor communication meant the public were often bewildered by the travel advice,” she said.
Paul Charles, chief executive of travel consultancy The PC Agency, which campaigned against many of the travel rules, said the NAO’s report “highlights a catalogue of failures.”
“It is now clear that there was no joined-up thinking between departments on cross-border travel policies and that no consideration was given to the cost to the taxpayer of introducing a raft of hare-brained measures,” he said.
“The government severely damaged a world-class sector and destroyed tens of thousands of jobs over a two-year period. It has many lessons to learn about the way it handles such an event in future.”
A UK government spokesperson said: “The pandemic was an unprecedented challenge and we acted swiftly and decisively to implement policies designed to save lives and protect the NHS (National Health Service) from being overwhelmed.
“As the report notes, considerable efforts were made across government to put border measures in place that helped to protect the UK from arriving cases of COVID-19.
“These measures bought vital time for our domestic response to new and concerning variants, contributing to the national effort to contain and manage the virus.”
