Airlines and airports ‘horribly self-serving’ during Covid, says top civil servant in leaked messages

‘I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premier inn shoe box,’ Sir Simon Case joked of hotel quarantine

Red alert: the queue for hotel quarantine at London Heathrow Airport in February 2021 (Simon Calder)

The UK’s aviation industry was “horribly self-serving” during the Covid pandemic, the top civil servant said at the time.

Sir Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, made the remark in a WhatsApp exchange with the then-Health Secretary, Matt Hancock.

The messages have been released by the Telegraph from more than 100,000 communications passed to them by a journalist.

On 5 February 2021, a month after a 19-week ban on international leisure travel had begun, Mr Hancock wrote: “The airlines and airports are totally offside. Completely unhelpful. Don’t get that there’s a war on.”

He conceded: “And of course v hard for them as they’re going bust.”

Mr Case concurred: “Yes, tough for them, but they are just so horribly self-serving. I can’t summon much sympathy for them any more when I see them.”

The pair then went on to discuss plans for hotel quarantine.

Mr Hancock wrote: “Priti [Patel, Home Secretary] and Grant [Shapps, Transport Secretary] both playing nicely and HMT [the Treasury] turning round business cases fast. So we CAN make it work – but I want it to LOOK good too which will be next to impossible.”

Mr Case wrote: “Don’t make it look too good or else people will think it is okay to travel!”

Mr Hancock: “I don’t want it to look inviting – I want it to look competent!”

Mr Case: “Ha ha! That would be good!”

At some point the same day – it is not clear exactly when – the pair talked further about hotel quarantine.

Mr Hancock wrote: “We are giving big families all the suites and putting pop stars in the box rooms.”

Mr Case replied: “I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premier inn shoe box.”

The hotel quarantine scheme took effect on 15 February for arrivals from 33 “red list” countries. They paid around £2,000 for 11 nights of hotel quarantine.

The day after it took effect, Mr Case asked: “Any idea how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday?”

Mr Hancock replied: “None. But 149 chose to enter the country and are now in Quarantine Hotels due to their own free will!”

“Hilarious,” wrote Mr Case.

MPs later heavily criticised the hotel quarantine system as pointless.

The senior Labour MP, Ben Bradshaw – a member of the Transport Select Committee – said: “The stop, start and stop again travel bans were one of the most chaotic, damaging and unnecessary aspects of the Government’s Covid response that did huge damage to the travel industry.

“Pop-up testing companies made a fortune, yet the evidence suggests the travel restrictions played little or no role in tackling the virus. In each wave the virus was already spreading in the domestic population by the time the borders closed.

“Unless you were New Zealand or Australia who could completely cut yourselves off, the travel bans served little purpose. It will be sickening to all those companies that went bust and to the people who lost their jobs to have been spoken about in such cavalier terms by Tory ministers and senior civil servants.”

Paul Charles, CEO of travel consultancy The PC Agency, says: “The disdain shown for an industry that employs one in 10 people in the UK is a disgrace.

“There’s no sense of looking to support where possible, just criticism and arrogance at a time when businesses across travel and tourism were hurting so much.

“These messages reinforce how out-of-touch those making ineffective decisions were. They don’t deserve to ever be in power again.”

The Independent has asked the Airport Operators’ Association for a response to the remarks by Mr Case and Mr Hancock.

Airports and airlines collectively lost billions of pounds and tens of thousands of staff during the coronavirus pandemic