Editorial Comment:
It is hard enough when tourists are told they will have to face a 14-day quarantine on return to the UK; the way in which such a policy can be dropped on travellers, as if a demand to “get out of Dodge”, makes it much worse. The worrying situation facing the estimated 450,000 Britons currently in France is a case in point.
Of course, foreign travel is a gamble in the middle of a pandemic, a fact that most travellers will freely acknowledge. But the Government also has a duty to provide a coherent policy framework that can be understood by everyone and, therefore, reasonably predicted.
Unfortunately, this has not always been the case. The approach taken towards Spain last month, for example, was unsophisticated in the extreme: only a few hours’ warning and the entire country was reincluded in the quarantine restrictions, regardless of the rates of infection in individual regions.
Some of Spain’s islands had few cases of the virus and other European countries decided to continue to permit travel to them. It is still unclear as to why the British Government did not elect to do the same.
The costs of such blanket measures, and the constant changing of policy, should not be underestimated. The aviation industry has already been devastated by restrictions on travel imposed during the pandemic. Many airlines will not survive a quarantine policy that has at times appeared arbitrary, and which may now have the effect of prompting many travellers to cancel their summer plans.
Tourists should not have to live under such a cloud of uncertainty, either. To discover, while on holiday, that you must quarantine for a fortnight on your return will be an unaffordable imposition for many, particularly those who cannot work from home.
Ministers argue that they need to act swiftly, and it is true that there has been a concerning rise in virus cases in some parts of Europe, although even within the affected countries some regions appear to be largely untouched.
Yet too many questions about the nature of these restrictions, why they have been imposed, and the Government’s assessment of their consequences, have been left unanswered. At the very least, the thinking behind them needs to be better explained.