Taking unscrupulous travel test providers to task can’t come soon enough

Fit to fly is now a meaningless concept; fit for purpose, even more so

Hurrah: home tests to rid us of winter wave misery are on the horizon. For flu, that is. Ministers believe that (yet) another spread could be afoot come the colder months if people with the flu virus, which has similar symptoms to Covid, get tested for the latter and then think their negative result means they are in fine health – potentially leading the unknowingly infected to become seriously ill and require hospitalisation.

More self-diagnostic tests make sense in principle. But given the efficacy of lateral flows is around 65 per cent, and negative ones have done little to speed up any area of unlocking, mightn’t the Government get its house in order on DIY Covid kits before adding a new swabbing enterprise into the already chaotic mix?

Nowhere has this testing chaos loomed larger than in travel, where a heady combination of lateral flows, PCRS and quasifutile vaccine passports have created an environment beset with “excessive” pricing and “exploitative practices” – so much so that Sajid Javid has written to the Competition and Markets Authority, asking it to conduct a “rapid high-level review” to crack down on the most unscrupulous offenders.

This would be the stuff of formal investigations, if we had months to play with. But as we are already in the throes of the holiday season, the Health Secretary has apparently realised there’s a smidge of urgency in blowing the doors off the testing racket, which began when travel restrictions were lifted in May and has only worsened since.

The average cost of a PCR test – of which up to four may be required for a single trip, even if you are double-jabbed – is £75, dropping to £30 or rising to £270, depending on where you go. It’s not as simple as picking the low-cost option, thanks to a lack of availability in certain areas, and the many companies that advertise at a fraction of what they turn out to charge. No wonder we’ve forked out £35million on holiday swabbing, a now billion-pound industry manufactured by the pandemic.

The Government’s website points out it does not “endorse, recommend or approve any private provider” – though it does list them all, including nonaccredited ones. On one day last week, there was a price range of £23.99 to £575 for the same test.

In Greece and Italy, prices are capped; in France, the tests are free.

Here – which research shows is globally the biggest rip-off going – we pay over the odds for a barely functional system the Government has only just realised smacks of unfairness, pricing people out of seeing much-missed family, and transforming a once simple area of life into a nightmare so unaffordable and stressful that many have given up on the prospect of touching down on foreign tarmac ever again.

You don’t have to look far for tales of testing hell. Everyone knows someone put through the wringer by home kits that failed to arrive, negative result certificates riddled with errors (or not being produced at all by the time of take-off) and virtual appointments that never took place – or, in my case, as a double jab-ee in a green list country, all three. Fit to fly has fast become a meaningless concept; fit for purpose, even more so.

Take Randox Health, which sells tests under its own insignia but also processes competitors’ swabs at its labs. It didn’t manage to send kits to myself or two other people I know in the required time before leaving the country, yet still hoover up a significant portion of Britain’s PCR business. In recent days, at several of its drop-off points, tests returned by travellers were pictured piled up and spilling out on to the street.

Day 2 tests for returnees from green list countries are easily the biggest financial shakedown of all, given that the traveller is usually coming from somewhere with lower Covid rates than ours and, if their result is returned days late, they will have unknowingly been spreading the virus until the company in question bothered to do what it had been paid a vast sum for.

The Government probably thought this explosion of private testing was a very good idea – one that would appeal to heartland voters, cut adrift by much of the party’s Covid stance, where businesses could flourish, money could be made, and some glimmer of normality could resume.

Instead, they’ve shown the endeavour at its worst: allowing for cream to be skimmed off the top of people’s misery, for the long-awaited reward of a trip to be turned into a costly headache, and for it to go on without compunction for months.

Sky-rocketing premiums and an absence of industry regulation have revealed the true winners in the ultimate game of profit amid loss – and it’s clear the average holidaymaker isn’t among them.