UK quarantine hotels cost taxpayer £400m, watchdog finds

theguardian.com:

Quarantine hotels for inbound travellers to the UK during Covid have cost the taxpayer more than £400m, a National Audit Office (NAO) investigation has found, including almost £100m in unpaid room bills and fraud.

While the government expected the hotels’ costs would be covered by the occupants, it has emerged that the taxpayer has been left responsible for more than half of the £757m bill. The rooms were for those travelling to the UK from high-risk “red list” countries during the pandemic.

The Department of Health and Social Care, which issued a £385m contract to Corporate Travel Management to run the hotels, told the NAO that about £74m of bills covering rooms and Covid tests have not been paid. Another £18m has been fraudulently reclaimed in credit card chargebacks, but only two cases have been investigated or challenged.

The losses were revealed in a NAO report on how the UK managed cross-border travel during the pandemic. The report found that travel rules and border policy were incoherent, confusing and costly, and the government had no way of evaluating if they were worth it.

Among other policies reviewed by the NAO were passenger locator forms, introduced in June 2020, for inbound travellers to state where they would be staying and isolating. The report found that since September 2021, less than 1% of the forms were checked by border force officials. The information given was entirely down to self-declaration, while “checks by private-sector carriers focused on the existence rather than the accuracy of data”.

The UK Health Security Agency, which had a £114m contract for home visits to check if travellers were self-isolating, could not confirm whether 33% of those required to isolate actually did so.

The NAO also