Tuesday, 23 Apr 2024

High risk UK arrivals 'to be quarantined in hotel for ten days'

Boris Johnson is expected to announce that some UK travellers will have to quarantine in hotels for 10 days.

Arrivals from Brazil and South Africa, as well as some neighbouring countries, would have to pay for the mandatory stay, the prime minister could announce tomorrow.

The Mail on Sunday report that Mr Johnson will chair the Covid-O committee tomorrow where the move will be discussed.

He is believed to favour a more targeted approach to quarantine, with only high risk countries affected.

New variants have been identified in Brazil and South Africa which the government wants to prevent taking hold in the UK.

The paper said spot checks to ensure people are complying with the present quarantine measures will be ‘ramped up’.

They would be carried out by police officers or officials from Public Health England, a source said.

Labour’s Nick Thomas-Symonds has urged Boris Johnson to introduce an ‘effective’ border testing and quarantining regime, arguing: ‘Nobody could say that the situation at our borders is satisfactory.’

The shadow home secretary said the country needed a ‘comprehensive system and plan from the Government and stop moving from one chaotic situation to another’.

The Government, he said, ‘was an international outlier’ in its approach to travel protection as he called on it to ‘get a grip’ after acting ‘too slowly’, and indicated his support for the use of hotels.

Mr Thomas-Symonds told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday: ‘The Government did not introduce a comprehensive quarantining regime until June last year. This Government was an international outlier. If you go back to May last year, it was only the UK, Iran, Luxembourg and the US Virgin Islands that had no travel protections in place.

‘It was too slow, it was put into place in June, it isn’t effective at the moment, we need that additional quarantining protection in place. I would support, for example, the introduction of the use of hotels, but above all we need a comprehensive system and plan from the Government and stop moving from one chaotic situation to another.’

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