By Ben Kerrigan-
Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps,(pictured) has warned the British public not to book holidays right now, domestically or internationally.
Mr Shapps warning was to put to bed any plans of people to travel in the middle of the pandemic.
The British government said it would impose a 10 year sentence against anyone who lied about travelling to red zones like South African, where a dangerous variant of the coronavirus has been spotted. The provision for such harsh sentence was attacked by former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption and ex-Attorney General Dominic Grieve.
Former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption said the mooted maximum 10-year prison term for travellers who try to hide their movements ‘inhumane’ -, as he contrasted the potential lengthy jail term as being longer than for some sex offences.
Ex-Attorney General Dominic Grieve said he found the 10-year sentence ‘draconian’.
However, questions were raised this morning over whether the law is going to be changed at all – with some Cabinet ministers suggesting Mr Hancock was just pointing to the current provisions in the Forgery Act.
And Mr Shapps insisted the move was ‘appropriate’.
‘It’s up to 10 years, it’s a tariff, it’s not necessarily how long somebody would go to prison for,’ he told BBC Breakfast.
He went on to add: “The Prime Minister will say more about the route to unlocking this country, starting when he speaks about it on February 22.
“But we don’t know yet whether that will include information on things like holidays, simply because we don’t know where we’ll be up to in terms of the decline in cases, deaths, vaccination.
“And not just the vaccination programme here, but the vaccination programme internationally, because people will be going outside of our borders.
“So it’s too soon.”
Mr Shapps comments follow the announcement yesterday of how quarantine hotels will work and their cost by Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
Travellers will be required to stay in a hotel for ten days at a cost of £1,750 after returning from a trip to a select number of ‘red list’ countries.
Strong Action
This morning, Grant Shapps said “strong action” was necessary to keep new mutations away from British shores.
Mr Shapps said the public would expect strong action if lives were being put at risk by people bringing dangerous new variants into the country.
“I do think it is serious if people put others in danger by deliberately misleading and saying that you weren’t in Brazil or South Africa, or one of the red list countries,” he said.
“I think the British public would expect pretty strong action because we’re not talking now just about, ‘Oh there’s a lot of coronavirus in that country and you might bring some more of it back when we already have plenty of it here’.
“What we’re talking about now are the mutations, the variants, and that is a different matter, because we don’t want to be in a situation where we later on discover that there’s a problem with vaccines”.