A CNN team arriving to the UK on Saturday experienced the lax and chaotic enforcement of a mandatory quarantine rule put into effect by the British government earlier this month.
Anyone arriving in the UK is required to quarantine for 14 days, a rule that came into effect on June 8.
Passengers are required to provide their contact details, so authorities can ensure quarantine measures are enforced.
On the day the program began, a spokesperson for Public Health England told CNN that a private company would be conducting spot checks with phone calls, rather than in-person visits. There is a long list of exemptions from quarantine, including truckers and those who cross the Irish border.
A CNN team traveling from Reykjavik, Iceland, at Luton Airport, north of London, was asked to fill in an electronic form on their phones before take-off, and submit a long list of personal and contact information.
Passengers filling out the form were given the option of being contacted only by text message, rather than a phone call, if they could provide a reason for the preference. The form was accessed by scanning a QR code, or by manually typing in a URL that featured a series of more than 50 random digits.
On arrival, Luton Airport featured prominent signage advertising the requirements, but there was no verification by authorities of any information submitted in the form. Two agents from Border Force asked that passengers from two planes flash the electronic forms on the phones in order to proceed.
A group of elderly passengers who had not filled out the form in advance was directed to a series of iPads, where they were left to fill out the forms with no assistance.
The UK government has said that quarantine measures were introduced in June precisely because other countries were opening up. Politicians said that reopenings presented a higher risk of new cases of coronavirus arriving from abroad.
"Travelers from overseas could become a high proportion of the overall number of infections in the UK, and therefore increase the spread of the disease," the UK's Home Secretary, Priti Patel, told Parliament on June 3.
Several airlines, including British Airways, Easyjet and Ryanair, have launched a legal action against the quarantine rules, saying the restrictions “will have a devastating effect on British tourism and the wider economy and destroy thousands of jobs.”
CNN's Robert North, Vasco Cotovio and Joe Minihane contributed reporting.