U.K. Seeks Advice From Australia on How to Quarantine Travelers

(Bloomberg) -- The British government is seeking advice from Australia over how to quarantine travelers in hotels after they have arrived in the U.K., amid delays to a plan to prevent the import of new coronavirus strains.

“We’ve strengthened measures at the border and we’re clear that there’s more that needs to be done,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told broadcasters on Thursday. “We will be bringing forward further measures, but we’ve got to get this right.”

The government is facing calls to start the quarantine program because ministers themselves have warned of the risk that a new Covid-19 variant could prove immune to vaccines being rolled out in the U.K.

Johnson said last month ministers were exploring compulsory quarantine in hotels for all arrivals, before the government announced a plan limited to people coming from regions designated as high risk, including South America and South Africa. But the policy has still not been implemented and no date has been set for when it will be.

Backtracking

On Wednesday, the prime minister said Hancock would spell out more details on Thursday. Johnson’s office then backtracked, saying the premier misspoke, and that more details will instead come next week.

“People and officials from a number of different government departments are working on this,” Johnson’s spokesman, Jamie Davies, told reporters.

Countries including Australia and Singapore already have a system of compulsory quarantine in hotels, and Hancock said he had spoken to his Australian counterpart on Thursday about how the system operates. More than 110,000 people in the U.K. have died from coronavirus, compared to 909 in Austrlia.

But the head of one of the biggest hotel groups operating near U.K. airports criticized the government, saying he had not held any detailed talks with officials.

“It seems logical to me that you’d sit down with the airlines, the airport operators and the hotel operators and thrash this out,” Rob Paterson, Chief Executive Officer of Best Western Hotels, told BBC radio. “In any normal company if you went out and announced a program nationally and you hadn’t thought about how you were going to plan that and you hadn’t spoken to the people involved, I’m not sure I’d have a job if I did that in my company.”

Arrivals in the U.K. are already required to show a negative Covid-19 test and isolate for 10 days, but there’s no set location, making enforcement difficult. They face fines if they are caught not complying. Critics point out that people are allowed to use public transport to reach the place they plan to self-isolate.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.