Up to 15,000 people a day are coming into the country and more than 100 people a day are going into quarantine hotels, MPs have been told.
Paul Lincoln, the director general of Border Force, told the Commons Home Affairs Committee: “In broad terms there are about 14,000 or 15,000 people coming into the country on any given day – that is now about 95% down from what we would have seen at this time routinely in previous years.”
Mr Lincoln said that “about a third or more” of them would be hauliers coming into the country and about a third of those are British citizens.
Among the 15,000 people who have come in “only 100 or so people per day” are going into hotels.
He said there are around 1,100-1,200 people currently in the managed quarantine service hotels.
Travellers arriving in England must quarantine in a hotel if they have been in a country at high risk of coronavirus variants in the previous 10 days.
Scotland has extended the requirement to cover arrivals from any country unless they have travelled from the Common Travel Area (CTA), which includes the UK and Ireland.
Guests are allowed to leave after 11 nights if they receive negative results from tests taken on day two and day eight of their isolation.
A positive result from the first test will extend a traveller’s stay by two nights.
