Travellers arriving in the UK and put into hotels for Covid-19 quarantine will be charged £1,750 for their stay, Matt Hancock has confirmed.
The health secretary said people caught flouting the rules can be fined up to £10,000 and face 10 years in prison.
In a statement to MPs in the Commons on Tuesday, Mr Hancock said 16 hotels are involved in the quarantine programme and will take travellers from Monday.
The plan was floated last week that UK nationals returning from 33 "red list" countries would be required to quarantine in closely monitored government-designated hotels, where they would have to take two tests.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has concluded it is "extremely unlikely" coronavirus spread from a Chinese laboratory leak and no further work is needed to investigate this theory.
The WHO said its probe into the origins of Sars-CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19, had uncovered new information but had not dramatically changed the picture of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan.
Experts believe the virus could have been circulating in other regions before it was identified in the central Chinese city at the end of 2019.
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