A former Tory minister has criticised the Government’s response to coronavirus, saying lockdown was too slow and quarantine now is not enough.

Conservative MP Caroline Nokes said the decision to enforce a 14-day period of self-isolation for travellers entering the UK has come ‘at the wrong time’.

Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain today, the former immigration minister said: ‘I think there have been challenges and 2020 hindsight is always a marvellous thing but its crucially important that we learn the lessons, that we act as quickly as we can in those areas where we haven’t done well.’

She added: ‘Too many people have died, too many people have been infected and I have said from the outset I think we were slow into lockdown.

‘Quarantine is coming at the wrong time and had we quarantined sooner, perhaps followed the models of countries like Australia and New Zealand who closed borders, we would have seen fewer infections.’

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People arriving in the UK face £1,000 fines if they fail to go into quarantine for 14 days under measures to guard against a second wave of coronavirus.

The new rules, introduced this week, apply to tourists as well as British nationals returning from abroad.

All passsengers now have to fill out an online locater form giving their contact and travel details, as well as the address of where they will isolate.

But the process was described as an ‘utter farce’ on the first day of its rollout with ‘thousands’ of Brits rushing to get home before they came into effect causing a huge queue at the Calais border.

Yesterday an unwell traveller who said he needed to go to hospital after landing at Heathrow Airport said he had no idea about the new quarantine rule.

Having arrived from Switzerland on Monday he said no one told him that foreign visitors to Britain now have to stay in one place for two weeks and register their address with border officials. He added that he was about to get onto the Tube to central London despite his illness.

Ms Nokes also told Good Morning Britain that she was disappointmented that a Public Health England review that found BAME people are more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people, made no recommendations on how to protect those communities.

Amid global protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movements, Ms Nokes has called on Boris Johnson to demonstrate how he supports black lives in the UK by introducing measures to protect BAME communities from Covid-19.

Hitting out at a lack of action since the PHE report, she previously said of BAME people watching Johnson: ‘You would be perfectly entitled to ask: “Well, if black lives matter, show me how they matter – show me how you have taken an action that demonstrates that our lives matter.”

The chairwoman of the Women and Equalities Committee backed the removal of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, saying it was ‘terribly symbolic’, but disagreed with the way it was done.

She said: ‘If we’re going to remove these historic artefacts then we should do it carefully.

‘We should have a discussion about what happens to them next, how can we continue to learn from that history and please can we do it appropriately, not drag down monuments and throw them into the harbour, because actually that causes all sorts of damage and issues.’

Ms Nokes added: ‘That was terribly symbolic and right that it should have happened but can we have a proper debate and do this in a right and thoughtful way?’

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