Policy changes in neighbouring Ireland is reportedly putting serious, and growing, pressure on the government of the United Kingdom to also drop its hotel-quarantine scheme – including from some of its own departments.
The UK’s Department for Transport “is understood to back the move which would end the requirement for travellers from red-list countries to self-isolate in government-approved hotels” reported The Telegraph, on the back of Ireland doing just that.
Those entering the UK from South Africa can currently pay as much as £2,285 per person (not much shy of the equivalent of R50,000) to comply with the rule.
On the weekend, Ireland dropped hotel quarantine for the last countries on its high-risk list, with immediate effect. That includes people who arrive without proof of vaccination or a recent Covid-19 test, who will simply be told to self-isolate.
Ireland said hotel quarantine was a necessary measure during an extraordinary time, but was no longer required.
For British and Irish citizens, travel between the two countries is subject only to spot checks at their borders. Their Common Travel Area (which also includes Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man) pre-dated and survived Brexit, and means the citizens of the two countries are not asked for travel documents, though they may be required to prove citizenship in order to claim their right to freely move between the two.
The travel rules between the two means their citizens are not asked for standard Covid-19-related passenger locator forms that list where they recently travelled, experts in the travel industry say – and so a citizen of Ireland or Britain could leave South Africa on one ticket, and cross to the UK on another ticket without being detected.
That would not apply to South African citizens, and UK or Irish citizens doing so would technically be breaking a requirement to fill in a passenger locator form, which is required even for those travelling from Ireland if they had not spent at least 10 days there.
Citizenship spot-checks between the two countries reportedly now include questions about prior travel, which would mean refusing to answer border agents, lying to them, or admitting to originating from South Africa, for those selected.
But the Irish change – and the mere prospect of such transit to avoid quarantine, is being wielded by the British travel industry as proof that the hotel quarantine system in that country must be ditched.
The UK instituted the mandatory quarantine system in response to the beta variant first detected in South Africa. Worries about beta have since been replaced by concern about the delta variant, which has been the dominant strain the UK since mid-year.
Earlier this month, the UK removed several countries from its red list, so dropping the requirement for all people arriving from those countries to quarantine in government-selected hotels. South Africa was not among them, despite increased lobbying from the South African government.
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South African experts slammed the failure to drop the ban on South Africans as irrational, and asked to see the evidence on which the decision was based, with the firm belief that there had been no scientific justification.
Experts from South Africa were scheduled to meet with their UK counterparts on Monday to discuss the list.
