Managing cross-border travel during the COVID-19 pandemic

a) Departments should establish who is responsible for capturing and managing the risks for an overall system-based approach to COVID-19 or similar travel measures. Working together, departments should clarify the government?s risk appetite as a basis for any future cross-border travel measures that may be needed to respond to COVID-19 or similar threats, so that planning across government for measures, or their reintroduction should they be needed, is proportionate.

b) Departments should establish a clear system-level risk management framework to support government decision-making. The framework needs to be responsive to capture the dynamic and complex circumstances of the pandemic; informed by up-to-date data against relevant performance metrics, captured and brought together in a way that is visible and documented, shared and understood by all bodies implementing the overall system. A shared understanding is needed of the type of scenarios that would lead to a reintroduction of measures, so that those implementing measures can plan ahead. An agreed, more codified, approach to documenting key decisions in times of crisis is also needed.

d) departments should capture lessons from the performance of the overall system so far. After two years government has experience of implementing a range of different approaches to its travel measures and should take stock to capture what has worked well and what has worked less well. Part of this should be an understanding of relative cost and effectiveness flowing from measures, and the benefits of measures being communicated in a clear and timely way to those responsible for implementing them. Any lessons which could inform future situations where a crisis response at the border is required should be included.

e) Departments should establish the mechanisms for oversight and regulation from the outset when government creates a new market. The DHSC needs to formally respond to the CMA?s recommendations on the testing market. For any future creation of specific markets, departments should draw upon principles of effective regulation at the design stage so as to better control prices and maintain service standards.

f) Departments should determine the costs of the cross-border travel measures when they implement them. Future decisions about the value for money of implementing a range of approaches and adjusting them in response to changing circumstances need to be informed by a better understanding of the costs to the taxpayer of implementing the overall system, and clear rationale of the costs of measures compared with the benefits of implementing them. This should also include the avoidance of unnecessary expense to the taxpayer such as likely levels of non-payment for services and fraud. Processes to recover costs, such as those relating to non-payment of MQS bills, should be implemented on a timely basis before the opportunity to return funds to the taxpayer is lost.