Travellers to the UK from 30 high-risk countries who lie about where they have come from will face £10,000 fines or up to 10 years in jail.
Ministers are concerned that people will fail to declare where they have come from on passenger locator forms in a bid to avoid 11 days of hotel quarantine.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, announced that those who lie on their forms will face £10,000 fines and face prosecution for forgery, which carries a jail term of 10 years.
The health secretary also set out the first details of the hotel quarantine scheme for those travelling to the UK from 33 “red-list” countries where potentially vaccine-resistant strains of coronavirus are prevalent.
The scheme is being implemented on Monday and the government is attempting to secure 28,000 hotel rooms to accommodate 1,425 passengers a day. However, Hancock announced that the government has only secured 5,600 rooms in 16 hotels.
People will be charged £1,750 11 days quarantine to cover the cost of transport to hotels, their room and their food. They will be required to book their room in advance on a government website, which is due to be launched later this week. Those who fail to go into hotel quarantine will face £10,000 fines.
The government has also announced a new testing regime for all other travellers. They will be required to get a PCR test on day two and day eight of their stay, which they will be expected to pay for themselves.
Those who fail to do so will face a £1,000 fine for the first missed test and a £2,000 fine for their second. Their quarantine period will automatically be extended to 14 days if they fail to take a test.
Announcing the changes in the Commons, Hancock said he made “no apology” for the harshness of the new penalties which he said were “mission critical” to easing the UK’s lockdown.
“We’re dealing with one of the strongest threats to our public health that we’ve faced as a nation,” he said.
“We must protect this hard won progress by making sure we secure the nation against new variants of coronavirus.”
He added: “These new enforcement powers will make sure that the hard work and sacrifice isn’t undermined by a small minority who don’t want to follow the rules.”
Matt Hancock was due to give details of the new package of measures to deal with travel from high risk countries today
Asked whether the new controls were being imposed too late, Mr Eustice said: “I don’t really accept that. I think, ever since December when we started to see these other strains arriving, we have been incrementally strengthening our approach to the border.”
The extra testing burden — with the cost expected to fall on travellers — has added to concerns in the travel industry.
Paul Charles, from The PC Agency travel consultants and the Quash Quarantine campaign, told
Today: “It’s quite clear we have entered a much tougher new phase where the government wants to squeeze border entry and exit completely by adding these layers of complexity.”
He added that if passengers had to pay for three tests — including one pre-departure — that would “obviously kill off travel, that will stop anybody really, even if they have to make an essential trip”.
He suggested that the furlough scheme would have to be extended to protect the travel industry.
Derek Jones, chief executive of the luxury travel company Kuoni, welcomed the plan to test arriving travellers but called for it to coincide with an easing of mandatory self-isolation requirements.
“A robust testing regime is the way to open up travel again but it has to replace or at least shorten quarantine,” he said.
“That’s the way to get travel moving again.”
