The government is in a mess over its travel advice

It is fortunate that the British cabinet isn’t a firm of travel agents, for they would soon be getting negative reviews on TripAdvisor. It is not just that the “traffic light” system is inherently confusing, given that “amber” has quite different connotations to different people, but that the additional “clarifications” offered by various members of the team vary so markedly.

Only the other day, George Eustice, the most easy-going of the travel advisers, was happy to get the brochures out for those interested in a break in the amber sun: “We don’t want to stop travel altogether and the reason, as Matt Hancock set out, that we have the amber list is there will be reasons why people feel they need to travel, either to visit family or indeed to visit friends.”

His colleague Mr Hancock has been rather less enthusiastic, and more keen on pushing a vacation in one of the green territories, Portugal perhaps, or maybe the Falkland Islands, for a change.

From the boss, Boris Johnson, known to enjoy his downtime, comes an uncharacteristically stern warning about an amber gamble. People should only travel to an amber list country “for some extreme circumstance, such as the serious illness of a family member […] You should not be going to an amber-list country on holiday.”

Nor is the picture made any clearer by his counterparts in Scotland, where prospective visitors to amber-list countries are told officially: “You should think carefully before booking travel to a country or area on the amber list for holidays or for any other leisure purpose. Travelling abroad carries a risk of bringing new cases and variants of Covid-19 into Scotland.”

By comparison the government website advice for England leaves no room for ambiguity: “You should not travel to amber-list countries or territories.”

The messages could scarcely be more conflicting and confusing, and that is not encouraging: the more mixed the message, the more room there will be for accidental or deliberate evasion of the rules on travel and on quarantining on return from places such as Spain (particularly Spain, as some islands have different rules to the mainland). It is a mess.

Experience shows that the British public much prefer clear, unambiguous rules, rather than vague invocations to take personal responsibility or exercise common sense. Such phrases may come in handy when ministers need to find an alibi for a failure in policy, and can thus blame the public for being irresponsible or failing to exercise common sense, but they do nothing to prevent the crisis from getting worse.

Should people go abroad for a holiday? The inconvenient truth is that the government doesn’t have a clear answer to that question, and even the safer “green” territories can be moved into the amber or red zones, and, indeed, vice versa. Indeed, British visitors will not necessarily be welcomed in all of their favourite haunts in any case.

Travel in both directions is made more complicated and expensive because of rules on testing and quarantining in designated hotels. The additional hassle and continuing uncertainty and confusion is surely putting some holidaymakers off making a booking. That is agonising for them and for the hard-pressed travel sector, but it is on balance better for the health of the nation.