The testing regime for international travel is little more than a tax on families

With staycations too expensive for many this year, writes Janet Street-Porter, why can’t Boris Johnson admit he’s penalising travellers?

If you’re enjoying a European break, you’ll get treated like a second-rate citizen for daring to leave Blighty (EPA)

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak think they’re setting an example by choosing to holiday in the UK, but anyone deciding to opt for sun, cheap booze and a bit of fun in a popular destination like Spain, Greece, Italy or Portugal will discover they have embarked on a confusing and costly escapade that will try their patience and cost a fortune.

Is the prime minister’s long-term plan to make foreign holidays so unattractive that we give up, stay at home and spend our cash in UK PLC, propping up Rishi’s sagging coffers? Is wanting hot sun every day (not once a month, interspersed with drenchings) and a baked-on tan, a little bit “common” for Tory toffs? Unpatriotic even?

It’s easy for Rishi to opt for a staycation – he can pop up the A1 to his mansion in the Yorkshire Dales, set in parkland with lots of space to relax with his wife and kids. Boris has plenty of rich old Etonian pals who (no doubt) will be offering the prime minister, his pregnant wife and small son a cottage on one of their estates. Let’s be honest, the Tories don’t book holidays like the rest of us.

They’ve got old school chums and distant relatives for house parties, shooting and fishing weekends. They’re not hanging on the phone to a call centre waiting to hear if their flight to Tenerife is cancelled, delayed or rescheduled. Or whether the booking they made for Benidorm can be pushed back a week while they try to get all the right tests.

This government seems determined to penalise anyone picking a foreign holiday this summer. The traffic lights system, including the dreaded red list, which requires compulsory hotel quarantine, can change without warning. This week, the popular destination of Mexico was suddenly plonked on the red list from next Monday, so anyone already there must dash home (if they can rebook a flight at no extra cost) or face paying out thousands of pounds to be incarcerated on return, even if they are double jabbed. And to rub salt in the wound, the government announced a massive hike in the cost of compulsory quarantine accommodation.

Travellers arriving into the UK cannot avoid these rules, unless, of course, you work for the government, and in a “special” category. Climate tsar Alok Sharma has visited 30 countries in seven months, including six on the red list, magically avoiding quarantine throughout – just like fellow cabinet minister Michael Gove, who returned from a football match in Portugal earlier this year and avoided self-isolation, because he was part of a pilot scheme for important people. (That’s the scheme Boris and Rishi considered using to opt out of self-isolation when recently “pinged”. Thankfully, common sense prevailed.)

The government seems determined – for all Boris’s patronising remarks about “understanding how important holidays are to ordinary folk” – to make foreign travel for pleasure (rather than business or work) as unattractive as possible. Travel restrictions, like vaccine passports, impact on the working and lower-middle class disproportionately.

Many holidaymakers are going abroad because travel in the UK is so expensive. British hotels have raised their prices and it’s cheaper to fly to New York or Florida than book a sleeper train to Fort William. Evening meals in many UK hotels come with set menus at a minimum of £25 a head. Parking, petrol, entrance fees to attractions – it all adds up. Although the yanks aren’t coming this summer, the British travel industry is fleecing the middle classes who are opting for a staycation because they can’t rent a villa in France or Italy. With increased demand, why stick to last year’s prices?

Most of the people booking foreign holidays are patriotic, and have followed the rules, even submitting to isolation if “pinged” by the NHS app, while business and sports people are routinely exempt. The other week, the government admitted that fashion industry executives would be allowed into the country without quarantine this September, because they were needed for British Fashion Week.

If you’re enjoying a European break, you’ll get treated like a second-rate citizen for daring to leave Blighty. Expect to be standing in line for hours to get back in – Heathrow still is woefully understaffed, with only two desks manned the other morning as flights returned from the Caribbean. There have been queues a mile long. Border Force people moan about lack of staff, lack of protection and the huge number of documents they have to check. But what has the government done but make the whole process even more complicated? Where are the extra workers at border control?

These officials now require more proof of testing, and it must be the right kind of test. Lateral flow is now deemed unacceptable over PCR, but that’s not a legal requirement, just to add to our confusion. Who wants to be turned back at Heathrow and have to spend even more on testing?

PCR tests (required on day two after returning from amber list countries, even if you’re double jabbed and also on day eight if you aren’t) can add an estimated £100 per person to the cost of a holiday – at a time when 94 per cent of the population are carrying antibodies and the government is planning to start vaccinating 16- and 17-year-olds. If adding £400 to the cost isn’t a stealth tax on ordinary citizens, I’m a banana.

PCR testing also has 20 per cent VAT added to the cost, making the UK one of the most expensive countries in the EU to re-enter. The government justifies “preferring” PCR testing to lateral flow, because of the dangers from new covid variants emerging overseas.

They may offer a list of approved test providers, but less than half cost under £30. Many of the companies have sold out and there are no slots available. The cheaper tests are only available to people willing to travel to centres a long way out of London. Once again, discriminating against families.

Why doesn’t Boris Johnson just come clean and say he’s taxing foreign travel?