Scotland's Covid lockdown tightened with click and collect and takeaway curbs

  • 1/13/2021
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Shops in Scotland have been ordered to stop non-essential click-and-collect services and alcohol consumption is to be banned outdoors, in a further tightening of lockdown measures. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, said shops would be allowed to offer click and collect only for essential goods such as clothes, shoes, baby equipment, books and homeware from Saturday 16 January. Takeaway outlets will be banned from allowing customers into the building. “I must stress at the outset that the situation we face in relation to the virus remains very precarious and extremely serious,” she told MSPs. UK government ministers are considering restricting click and collect in England, and Matt Hancock, the health secretary, joined Sturgeon in welcoming John Lewis’s voluntary decision on Tuesday to suspend its collect services. After announcing 79 further deaths, with 1,794 people in hospital with Covid, Sturgeon said shops must stagger collection times by offering appointments, as she set out six further controls on people’s movements and interactions. These included banning any alcohol consumption outdoors across all level 4 areas, preventing people from buying takeaway beers to drink outside. Sturgeon said Scotland’s stay-at-home legislation would be tightened to make it clear people were not legally allowed to remain outdoors for non-essential reasons once they had finished any essential task. That brought Scotland’s rules in line with those in the rest of the UK. New statutory guidance will tell employers they are now required to help their staff work from home, and restrictions on builders or plumbers working on non-essential tasks in homes will be enforced in law. Sturgeon said the current lockdown, which came into force across mainland Scotland on Boxing Day, seemed to be slowing the rate of increase in Covid cases. Testing suggested the new highly infectious variant, B117, was now responsible for 60% of cases, up from 50% in late December. “Case numbers are still so high and the new variant is so infectious that we must be as tough and as effective as we can to stop it spreading,” she told MSPs. The new measures were “a regrettable, but necessary, means to an end”. Business leaders and the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, urged the Scottish government to significantly speed up the rollout of business support funds. Davidson said a majority of Sturgeon’s promised support funds were still not operational. Tracy Black, the director of CBI Scotland, said click-and-collect services were vital to some retailers’ survival, particularly smaller shops. “It’s really important that the Scottish government sets out compelling evidence that these services are a source of transmission and provides additional, urgent support to compensate for what would be a further loss of revenue in increasingly challenging times,” she said.

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