Police say 50 people visited over travel quarantine restrictions
Just over 50 people have been visited by Police Scotland as part of efforts to ensure travellers are following quarantine restrictions, the chief constable has said.
Speaking at the Scottish Government’s daily coronavirus briefing, Iain Livingstone said a total of around 200 people had been contacted by the police due to possible breaches, with more than a quarter of those “physically attended” by officers.
The Scottish Government’s s ys t e m a r o und e nf o r c i ng quarantine has come under criticism with opposition parties claiming too few people are contacted by the police and Public Health Scotland ( PHS).
The comments came after j u s t i c e s e c r e t a r y Humza Yousaf was unable to provide the same figures to the health and sport committee in Holyrood.
Mr Yousaf was accused of “not being on top of his brief ” with t he evidence s ession labelled “chaotic” by opposition parties.
Mr Liv i ngstone s ai d t he numbers were a “ver y ver y small amount” of the number of people quarantining and said throughout the pandemic the police have dealt with 65,000 potential breaches of all Covid- 19 related laws with just 3,500 fixed penalty notices handed out.
He said: “Policing
i s ver y
much the backstop in regard to quarantine regulations and requirements.
“The way we deal with them is we try and do some follow up initially through a contact by the control centres in terms of telephone contact.
“If that is not possible we will deploy officers and over a quarter of the referrals that we’ve had, we have had officers physically attend and speak to people and it may be that we do a follow- up visits in that regard as well.
“We are there as a backstop to encourage and make sure people do do the right thing when there is absolute blatant flouting of the law but our approach to quarantine is the same, we will seek to encourage people to do the right thing.”
Nicola Sturgeon added that policing quarantine restrict i ons i s a “l ast resor t ” and said PHS contact all travellers required to quarantine by email followed by telephone calls to a random sample.