Public Accounts Committee Blasts Government for Spending £329 Million on Quarantine Hotels
At least £486 million of taxpayers’ money was 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 Guardian has more.
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 U.K. 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.
Worth reading in full.
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We’ve spent billions on the whole ‘covid’ ludicrousness with nothing much to show for it, except a shed load of debt.
And a load of crooks feeling they got away with it (seems they did), now spurred on to their next “endeavour”.
Here’s lookin at you, Billy Goats.
Where were these people at the time all this was being done?
Exactly. All very well coming over as holier than thou after the event. Why didn’t these shysters raise a stink while all this crap was going on?
“The report said the Government “does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”. I can save them some trouble: it didn’t. Of the many bizarre rituals we imposed at horrific cost, this was one of the most illogical. We were making people quarantine coming into the country when just about everyone here had Covid.
It was one of the things that made me really question whether the agenda here was to stop the peasants from travelling so that we can stop them creating more CO2. Of course, it doesn’t matter if your private jet does it.
The end paras above. In essence Hillier is still supporting the government line.
“We don’t have time.”
WTF is she on about? The “pandemic” that never was is over if people are allowed to go back to some sort of normal. I friggin despair at these troughers.
It’s all very well calling this out after the event. Cowards the lot of them.
Monkeypox? Arseholes. Achimptomatic transmission??
We live in an absolute ineptocracy.
The Chair’s attitude seems to be just as bad as that of the Gov, along the lines of “something must be done”, albeit criticising the level of expenditure. If there wasn’t a proper estimate, they can’t work it out to justify the financial effect compared with any real health benefits (if there were any).
It’s amazing how much was wasted in two years. And not just in the UK. Synchronised profligacy went hand in hand with draconian policies and hyper censorship & propaganda. The massive debt spending was clearly a coordinated policy. Spend on anything and everything especially in paying people not to work and to isolate themselves. Alongside spend on contracts that your friends can benefit for in a fake bidding system and then afterwards don’t hold any inquiries and shrug your shoulders and say “it was the biggest crisis since WW2.” Or some such bollocks. Conveniently no opposition to be had in any Western state, many of whom attend the same globalist meetings as those in power. That there wasn’t a single competent political leader anywhere in the West tells you that there is no hope, all our institutions of power have been captured by bug business and a globalist cult that are determined to engineer the complete destruction of our already precarious fiat currency debt driven financial system. Along the way they will issue laws an edicts to protect us from hate, terror, misinformation, disease, & most of all climate change. Of course all their policies are being negotiated in international… Read more »
“don’t do a damn thing about the real ecological disasters of poisoned oceans and dwindling agriculture,”
With the exception of the above, a fine post.
Agriculture is being destroyed purposefully in order to create famines.
Depopulation.
There are two or three things going on to destroy agriculture.
One is large scale conglomerate agriculture which uses depletive methods of farming. Over time the nutrients on these vast tracts of land are denuded and we get empty calories.
second, and part of the above, is the destruction of small scale farmers who generally practice less destructive forms of farming.
third is the active deactivation of farmland for so called green practices
All these processes drive down productivity and do lead to scarcity and crisis level outputs, which I agree are by design.
The oceans are being poisoned. The latest plankton tests on the Atlantic seem to indicate a 90% reduction. If this is a representative test (500 samples) the Atlantic is going to be a dead Oceon.
I wonder why these MPs didn’t ask a few more pertinent questions BEFORE they meekly allowed SAGE, Johnson and Sunak to wreck our economy ….. or even when it had become blindingly obvious that “the scamdemic” was nothing like as dangerous as they claimed in those ludicrous Daily Briefings (ie May 2020)?