HOTEL quarantine and bungled Covid contracts has set the taxpayer back billions of pounds, damning reports reveal.
Running the draconian prison-style hotels for people to stop Covid spreading cost an eye-watering £786million – half of which was subsidised by the taxpayer – according to the National Audit Office.
The Department for Health still has no idea how many Covid cases were stopped with the tough travel rules, which were changed at least ten times.
But just two per cent of all hotel quarantine guests tested positive between February and December 2021.
And only one per cent of people arriving in the UK had their complicated passenger locator forms checked.
Despite spending £114million on a contract to check people were keeping to their quarantine at home after travel, up to 42 per cent of people could not be reached.
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It comes as officials from the Health Department let slip they were disputing dozens of Covid PPE contracts signed during the pandemic – worth £2.7billion.
It’s less than a third of the £8.7billion which was estimated to have been lost on PPE that was unusable or past its use-by date.
Sir Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary for the Department of Health and Social Care told MPs that taking action retrospectively was now “not doable”.
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “The Conservatives have been literally burning through taxpayers’ money, and now admit they will only try to claw back a fraction of what they lost.
“Conservative Ministers are so incompetent that they failed to protect the public purse from profiteering, and now taxpayers are paying the price.”
