Cabinet to consider hotel quarantine policy this week
James ChappleThe cabinet will meet this week to consider a move to require UK arrivals to quarantine for 10 days at airport hotels upon their arrival.
The Telegraph reports the idea is among a number of measures minister will debate, including a full "Australian-style border closure".
It comes after prime minister Boris Johnson on Friday (22 January) said he could not rule out the government taking further action at the UK’s borders, despite requiring all those travelling to the UK to test negative for Covid before they depart and to quarantine for 10 days too.
All of the UK’s quarantine-free travel corridors have also been suspended. "We may need to go further to protect our borders," said Johnson.
Speaking to Times Radio at the weekend, health secretary Matt Hancock said it was "critical" the UK guarded against the import of new Covid variants, which may evade the vaccines so far deployed in the UK.
Professor Kamlesh Khunti, a member of the government’s scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage), told LBC the stricter measures "made complete sense".
The Times, meanwhile, reports government officials are confident of finding sufficient room capacity to make the hotel quarantine proposals work.
Labour has backed tougher measures to protect the UK’s borders, with shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds leading opposition calls for a "truly effective system of testing and quarantining".
"Nobody could say the situation at our borders is satisfactory, or that there is sufficient protection in place for our people against the different strains that could be coming from around the world," he said.
"So we need to put additional protections in place, we do need that effective border testing regime, and we also need an effective quarantining regime, which we’ve not had."
A year ago, the idea that the UK's borders could be all-but closed would have been unthinkable. But here we are, with the government actively considering such a step – and do you know what? Might it actually be the case that at this stage of the Covid crisis, so far through the looking glass as we are, that these tougher measures might actually be travel's best hope of a return to (relative) normality sooner rather than later? If a new Covid variant that is resistant to the Oxford/AZ and/or Pfizer/BioNTech jabs were to be imported thanks to international travel, it would likely reset much of the progress made in the fight against Covid. A border closure would undoubtedly be a devastating blow. But in a year of devastating blow after devastating blow, creating a window that would allow the NHS to vaccinate the country at pace while pairing it with the fairly sensible lockdown measures we've all grown accustomed to over the past 10 months might just offer travel a glimmer of hope by Easter – in time for the summer.
James Chapple
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