HEALTH Secretary Jeane Freeman has warned that eye-watering fines for Covid rule flouters could end up “punishing” some of the country’s poorest.
Over the weekend, Downing Street announced massive financial punishments for those in England disregarding instructions to self-isolate.
From next week, anyone who ignores an instruction to stay in their house and keep away from others can be slapped with a £1000 charge.
This can then rise to £10,000 for repeat offences and for “the most egregious breaches, including for those preventing others from self-isolating.”
This, Downing Street said, could include business owners who threaten self-isolating staff with redundancy if they do not come to work.
During an interview on the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland, Freeman was asked whether the Scottish Government would consider imposing similar fines.
The Health Secretary said the issue needed to be examined “the other way round”.
“I think what you need to do is look at what are the obstacles in somebody’s way who wants to self-isolate, wants to do the right thing but may have difficulties in doing so.
“One of those will be financial difficulties, so there needs to be an extension to ensure that we can offer financial support before you start talking about punishing people for not doing something that they want to do.”
She added: “We understand that very many people are in low paid jobs, with fragile contracts, sometimes in really difficult circumstances, so we need to win people to this fight with us.
“Simply imposing fines on them if they don’t, in and on itself won’t be sufficient. Those are big numbers which very many people would be completely beyond their capabilities.”
Freeman said she wanted to avoid “penalising” those on “fragile, zero-hour contracts” and low wages. The UK government also announced a new one-off support payment of £500 for anyone on a low-income forced to self-isolate.
UK Government sources told the Daily Record this payment would result in funding through the Barnett Formula.
It would then be up to ministers in Edinburgh to decide whether to bring in a similar policy.
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