The UK Will Impose Quarantine On Visitors…Sort Of…Sometime…

Some links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission that helps contribute to the running of the site. Traveling For Miles has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Traveling For Miles and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. For more details please see the disclosures found at the bottom of every page.

Update 15 May 2020: The UK government continues to dither and send mixed messages. Now there will be no exemption for visitors from France.

The UK government should step forward and take a bow. Few governments have managed to put out as many mixed messages in the past 3 days and I’m struggling to think of a government that has managed to confuse its citizens more with its recent attitude to the current crisis (and I include the US government in that evaluation). It takes a special level of ineptitude to be this confusing at a time when clarity is needed so some sort of prize would appear to be in order.

In last night’s address to the nation, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a series of announcements regarding the progress being made and the path his government will steer over the course of the coming weeks and months and, as far as travel goes, he made one very important announcement:

“To prevent reinfection from abroad, I’m serving notice that it will soon be the time, with transmissions significantly lower, to impose quarantine on people coming into this country by air.”

At the time of the announcement two key things stood out very clearly:

1. Details were very thin on the ground. No timeline was given to indicate when the quarantine will start, there was no mention of how long visitors would have to be in quarantine, and no indication was given of when or how often the quarantine restrictions would be reviewed.
2. The Prime Minister specifically mentioned that it would be travelers arriving by air who would be quarantined which led to the assumption that arrivals by boat and train would not be subject to quarantine.

Considering its huge significance to a large number of livelihoods, the lack of detail in this announcement was disappointing and made the whole thing sound like the UK government had come up with an idea but wasn’t quite sure how to run with it.

Since the broadcast we’ve heard from a number of other ministers and government employees and a bit more information has been released…although some of it hasn’t been officially confirmed (that would be too much to ask!)

• Visitors entering the UK will be required to self-isolate for 14 days (Confirmed)
• Visitors from the Republic of Ireland will be exempt (Confirmed)
• Visitors from France may be exempt (Not true – link)
• The restrictions will apply to all arrivals not just arrivals by air (Confirmed)
• The restrictions may be reviewed every 3 weeks.

More details may be released when the Prime Minister addresses Parliament later but, on this whole, the messaging so far has been more than a little pathetic.

Momentarily leaving aside the question of why the UK has decided to introduce a quarantine now rather than at the start of this crisis (as a lot of other countries chose to do), a number of other questions arise:

1. Why has the UK government chosen to announce a quarantine period when it clearly isn’t ready (able?) to share the actual details that people want to know. It seems more than a little half-baked.
2. Why did the Prime Minister specifically single out travelers arriving by air in his address to the nation when officials are now (less than 24 hours later) briefing that quarantine restrictions will apply to all arrivals? Did the UK government forget that the nation isn’t landlocked and that there are a number of well-known train services from Europe into the heart of London?
3. If travelers coming from France aren’t to be quarantined, doesn’t this essentially mean that any traveler who can enter France without having their passport checked (and whose origin cannot therefore be traced) can also enter the UK without being subject to quarantine?

What we have here is a situation which, to a lot of people (me included), makes very little sense and raises more questions than it provides answers. It’s a situation which is very bad news for the UK’s travel market (no one is going to visit the UK if they have to stay in their hotel for a minimum of 14 days) but it’s also one that doesn’t appear to do very much to actually prevent the spread of Covid-19 – it’s not like visitors arriving from France or Ireland are guaranteed not to be carriers!

Hopefully, a little more detail will be provided by the Prime Minister when he addresses Parliament in a few hours time (I’ll update this post if appropriate) but, as things stand, this soon-to-be-introduced measure not only appears to be coming too late but it also appears to be coming from a government that isn’t very sure of what it’s doing.