Plan to force travellers to quarantine at hotel airports could get the go-ahead tomorrow

Travellers to Britain could be forced to quarantine in airport hotels under plans to be discussed by ministers today.

Amid growing doubts over the summer holiday season, the Cabinet’s Covid operations committee will thrash out how to tighten border controls, pitting Cabinet members against each other.

Any new restrictions would be a further blow to the beleaguered travel industry and put the holiday plans of millions at risk.

It comes as Britain’s airports are already struggling to cope, with passengers queuing for hours on Thursday to get through passport control as the border situation worsened.

The lines were so long staff were said to have handed out free water to exhausted travellers just hours after the Home Office insisted there were no staffing issues and people were moving through in ‘good time’.

Rishi Sunak’s Treasury and Grant Schapps’ Department for Transport are pushing against new travel measures over the ‘severe’ impact they would have on aviation and the wider economy.  

But Priti Patel and Matt Hancock are eager to enforce harsher rules to stop mutant strains from entering the country and undermining the vaccine operation.

One senior source told The Telegraph: ‘Once in place, the restrictions would be difficult to exit, as Australia and New Zealand have found and their economies are suffering as a result. Nor have their quarantines and managed self-isolation proved watertight.’

The Home Secretary said last night it was ‘far too early to speculate’ about whether foreign holidays would be possible this summer. 

In a further sign of the disruption ahead, it emerged that EU leaders are discussing plans to close the borders to British travellers to slow the spread of the new Covid variant first identified in Kent.

Miss Patel, Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove are pushing for arrivals in the UK to be required to stay at ‘isolation centres’ to complete their ten-day quarantine.

In practice, this is likely to mean hotels, although it could include isolation at state-run premises as happened with travellers from Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic last year. 

However, one Government source said a final decision on the move had not been taken and might not be finalised until next week.

Leaked documents revealed last night that the Home Office even considered requiring travellers to wear electronic tags on arrival in the UK, like criminals released early from jail do. 

The idea was rejected because of concerns about legal challenges and the potential strain on the monitoring system.

The move to tighten the borders comes amid fears that new strains of the virus emerging abroad could undermine the effectiveness of the vaccination programme.

One Whitehall source said Mr Hancock was ‘paranoid’ about the threat from abroad, adding: ‘We are rolling out the vaccine now much faster than many other places. That is the key to unlocking in the UK.’

Mr Hancock told MPs the Government would be ‘very cautious on travel’ for now to stop the arrival of Covid variants against which vaccinces might not be so effective.

Miss Patel, who is pushing for tougher border restrictions, said the Government has already moved to close all travel corridors and banned all travel from South America following the emergence of a new strain in Brazil. 

She confirmed that further restrictions are being kept under review.

Ministers hope using hotels for isolation, as in Australia, will improve compliance with quarantine rules but have ruled out banning all inbound travel by foreign nationals.