UK Covid passports: how Boris Johnson’s big plan fell flat

Boris Johnson is the last prime minister on earth that his MPs would have expected to be in favour of a “papers for your pint” policy.

So it sent a shock wave through Westminster when, shortly after the review of Covid certification was launched, the prime minister said he was broadly supportive of the idea, even floating the idea of incentivising pubs and restaurants to use the them to ditch social distancing rules

What happened to the prime minister’s big idea? Although the review has not yet been released, it is common knowledge that the scheme is now widely regarded as unworkable.

Plans to use Covid passes have been radically scaled down – a combination of unworkable timeframes, business opposition and a looming parliamentary defeat.

The NHS app, on which the pass has been built, has been surprisingly smooth, but ministers now anticipate its use will mainly be confined to international travel and some pilot mass events such as Wimbledon.

The prime minister told MPs in March he had been converted to the idea. “I find myself in this long national conversation thinking very deeply about it”, he said, adding that the public “want me as prime minister to take all the action I can to protect them”.

One government source said: “I rather suspect somebody suggested to Boris that if we could just test people to show that they weren’t posing any risk, pubs could open and have people packed into them, wouldn’t that be brilliant?”

For some in No 10, part of the initial thinking behind domestic certification was motivated by concerns that young people would be much more hesitant to get vaccinated because they were less likely to get seriously ill if they caught Covid.

Related: Would Covid passports be damaging to public health? | Melinda Mills and Stephen Reicher

Focus groups were held to test what messages young people were most receptive to without feeling too aggressively “nudged” – and the message of domestic certification offering them the freedom to visit some social venues such as pubs chimed most strongly. A government source said they thought the certificates would “focus minds”.

Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister tasked with the review, had been enthused by the Israeli green pass system, which worked with either a vaccination, negative test or proof that you had previously tested positive for coronavirus – and thus now had antibodies.

Gove and the deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, flew to Israel in April to meet the country’s health minister, Yuli Edelstein.

The green pass, which was a QR code on smartphones, was used by citizens to access leisure facilities such as gyms and swimming pools, indoor restaurants and cafes, hotels, sports venues, theatres and cinemas. But the scheme has since been scrapped, with most citizens fully vaccinated.

There were significant issues with the Israeli scheme that concerned officials. Children were effectively banned from indoor spaces that required a green pass, because they had not been vaccinated. And huge numbers of cafes and bars simply did not enforce the requirement to show the pass.

But the key problem that the British scheme would have encountered is that the timings of vaccinations and reopenings of restaurants and pubs did not match up.

“This was the main stalling point,” one Whitehall source said. “Before the green pass, they hadn’t opened anything. It was an enabler. The timeline for them was perfect – it persuaded young people to get both jabs. We are not in that position. We’ve already opened pretty much everything.”

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The government always intended to have tests as an alternative to vaccination to allow people to use the Covid pass. But that also ran into major difficulties. “For pubs and restaurants a lot of their trade depends on spontaneity,” one Whitehall source said.

For some pilot mass events, lateral flow tests are being allowed as proof of Covid status. But officials believed that the potential for fraud in self-declaring results was far too great if the scheme had widespread rollout.

“The testing options are very difficult. For a while the plan was that all testing would have to be supervised testing,” one official said. “Obviously that requires huge resource and is massively inconvenient to have to go to a testing site each time.”

At the same time, another major problem was brewing – a huge rebellion by more than 40 Conservative MPs was being quietly coordinated. Labour was preparing to help those MPs defeat the government, with Keir Starmer saying he thought “British instinct” would be against the scheme. The Liberal Democrats were also fiercely opposed.

Privately, some cabinet ministers had doubts – including the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, and the Commons leader, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Steve Baker, the libertarian former minister who has been a key opponent of strict lockdown measures, said he sprang into action when Johnson’s support for the ideas seemed serious.

Related: Scientists urge caution after Tony Blair backs UK ‘Covid pass’

“Those of us who really object on principle, on civil libertarian grounds, which is people across left and right, leaped into the breach,” he said. “I managed to build a coalition. I think we will have made it look to government, correctly, that there is a voting block which would make it probable that it would be defeated.”

Baker said the breadth of opposition was “very, very strong” and said it would have been an opportunity for opposition parties. “I think it became clear that it was one of those moments where, whatever Labour splits might be, they would actually take the opportunity to defeat the government on it,” he said. Labour sources confirmed that Starmer had intended to whip the party to oppose.

There were some MPs who might have been persuaded, had the bulk of scientific opinion and the business and hospitality lobby been in favour of the scheme. The opposite was true.

“In private, Boris’ view seemed to be ‘why not let landlords decide?’ The industry basically felt it was being stitched up,” one source close to the review said.

In a joint statement, UK Hospitality, the British Beer and Pub Association and the British Institute of Innkeeping said vaccine passports could prevent “millions” of young people who had not received their jabs visiting the pub “for months”

Key clinical bodies submitted evidence to the review expressing deep reservations. The Royal College of GPs said it “risks negatively impacting on some patient groups more than others and by doing so widening existing inequalities”.

There were certainly some experts and some industries who thought the benefits of the scheme could outweigh practical difficulties. Major sporting bodies such as the Premier League and Wimbledon were “very supportive,” one source close to the review said.

The most surprising legacy of the review, something that has astounded Whitehall, is that technology was not the obstacle. The NHS app, which shows your vaccination status, has been rolled out smoothly and is expected to be used for international travel.

“I wouldn’t completely rule out their utility in the long-term,” one government source said. “Perhaps more so in the winter if it is a way of preventing us closing premises.”

Though Baker feels a coordinated effort has now killed any widespread usage, he said that he and many other MPs still had questions about the long-term use of surveillance tools such as the test-and-trace app aimed at combating Covid.

“I think we should expect social distancing, masks and test and trace to continue, and a big question for me is when do we shut down that entire operation?” he said.

“The people who think it’s a good idea for coronavirus will also think it’s a good idea for flu and they’ll think it’s a good idea to adjust our civil liberties to manage the pressures on the NHS. That could create intolerable divisions in government and the parliamentary party.”