Lying about your travels could mean a decade in jail, says Hancock

Travellers who try to conceal visits to “red list” countries face up to 10 years in jail, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs today. Under the new measures, which come into force on 15 February, passengers from 33 countries will have to quarantine in hotels, and all arrivals will have to pay for two coronavirus tests during quarantine:

“Anyone who lies on a passenger locator form and tries to conceal that they’ve been in a country on our red list in the ten days before arrival here, will face a prison sentence of up to 10 years,” he said.

Hancock also announced that the government would be “backing this new system with strong enforcement of both home quarantine and hotel quarantine”. This involves a £1,000 penalty for any international arrival who fails to take a mandatory test, a £2,000 penalty for failing to take the second mandatory test and a £5,000 Fixed Penalty Notice, rising to £10,000, for arrivals who fail to quarantine in a designated hotel.

Hancock stressed that under current restrictions, “it is of course illegal to travel abroad without a legally permitted reason to do so,” before reiterating the current measures: all arrivals into the UK are required to produce a negative Covid test 72 hours or less before flying and must self-isolate for 10 days in their own homes. “We’ve already banned travellers altogether from the 33 most concerning countries on our red list where the risk of a new variant is greatest unless they are residents here,” he added.

The countries on the red list are mainly in South America and southern Africa. But there is concern over the omission of 29 countries where the more transmissible South Africa variant has been identified by World Health Organisation analysis. Labour’s shadow home secretary has described the measures as “dangerously inadequate”.

Edward Argar, the health minister, said yesterday there have been 147 confirmed cases of the South Africa coronavirus variant in the UK but acknowledged his figures may be “a day or so out”.

Under the new measures, all travellers arriving in England will also have to take a Covid test on days two and eight of their 10-day quarantine. The mandatory PCR tests, which currently cost around £100 each, will be paid for by the travellers and booked in advance through an online portal. If either of these tests comes back positive, travellers will have to quarantine for a further 10 days from the date of the test. Any positive tests will automatically undergo genomic sequencing to identify variants of concern.

The new system currently applies only to England, but the Health Secretary said he was working on “similarly tough schemes” with the devolved administrations and the Irish government. He said the new measures will be put into law this week.

He also sought to address concerns over the hotel quarantine policy. Yesterday, it was revealed that the government had not yet issued a formal contract for the initiative. But today, Hancock told the Commons that the government has now signed a contract with 16 hotels for an initial 5,600 rooms.

“Any returning residents from [red list] countries will have to quarantine in an assigned hotel room for 10 days from the time of arrival,” he said. “Before they travel, they’ll have to book through an online platform and pay for a quarantine package, costing £1,750 for an individual travelling alone, which includes the hotel, transport and testing. This booking system will go live on Thursday.”

Arrivals will only be able to enter the UK through a small number of locations and be escorted to a designated hotel, which will be closed to guests who aren’t quarantining.

The Health Secretary’s announcement comes amid growing concerns over new variants entering the country that are more resistant to existing vaccines.

Yesterday, Sir Keir Starmer urged the government to “secure our borders” after concerns were raised that the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab may be less effective against the South African variant. The trial involving some 2,000 people, found that the jab offered “minimal protection” against mild and moderate disease caused by the South Africa variant. However, there were no severe cases of illness in the trial group, and experts are hopeful that research will prove the vaccine to be effective at preventing severe cases of the virus.

Meanwhile, some scientific figures have questioned the effectiveness of border control measures. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that strict border controls cannot completely halt the spread of the virus: “We know that borders cannot stop infectious diseases. No matter how rigid your controls are, there will always be some that comes through.”

He also questioned the long-term strategy of countries which have completely shut their borders.  “We’ve seen that countries that have closed their borders, such as New Zealand, have kept the virus out, but now their problem is what do they do when they begin to open their borders?

“So I think the best way forward is to live with the understanding that viruses and bacteria, any infection, can cross borders and we have to have the defences in our own countries to deal with them.”