Organisers Issued With £10,000 Fine

[malagabob]

The organisers of a wedding in East London, where there were 400 people, have been issued with a £10,000 fine.
Police went to the venue, where windows were blanked out.
Some guests fled. Others were issued fines.
First reports unsubstantiated said it was a Jewish wedding.

[bobbinwales]

Shame we cant make them all stay inside the premises to quarantine for 10-14 days in these cases.

[Togo]

Perhaps the Israeli government had "provided" covert batches of covid vaccine, seeing as they seem to have plenty of it, and they all turning up to get their shots.

[New Judge]

//They are in fact fines anyone not paying can be brought to court.//

//thanks danny, am sure newjudge said some of these werent fines//

Yes, New Judge did say they are not fines because they are not. Only a court can issue fines. One or two government institutions such as the Financial Services Authority sometimes report they have levied fines though I’m not sure of their exact legal standing. The police or local authorities definitely cannot impose fines. What they can do is to make an offer of a sum to be paid (a “fixed penalty”) to avoid prosecution. As far as the Covid legislation is concerned these sums are set in law (as are, for example, the fixed penalties payable to avoid motoring offences being prosecuted).

As I pointed out in another thread, the difficulty the government may face if they persist with this nonsense of announcing higher and higher levels of fixed penalties is that such sums will become more and more likely to remain unpaid. if somebody declines the offer of a fixed penalty or simply refuses to pay the matter must go to court. The court is obliged to levy a fine which reflects the seriousness of the offence but which, most importantly, is within the defendant’s ability to pay. Courts cannot fine people sums which they clearly cannot afford and, if allowing payment by instalments, must set a level which sees the matter disposed of in a reasonable period (usually a year). They cannot, for example, order that somebody pays £100 a week for the rest of their life. That is why to announce ever-increasing levels of fixed penalties is utterly pointless. They will remain unpaid, the matter will go to court and the court will decide on a sum the defendant can afford.

When it’s a couple of hundred quid there are few people who cannot afford that and going to court will almost certainly cost them more. But when it starts creeping into thousands of pounds (which Ms Patel’s latest wheeze does) there will be more and more cases for an already overstretched court system. But as I also pointed out, another factor of which Ms Patel is also obviously blissfully unaware is that people committing such offences do not expect to get caught. So not expecting to pay £200 is no different to not expecting to pay £2,000. But successive Home Secretaries in recent times have demonstrated a particularly consistent tendency to be unaware of the effects and outcomes their decisions are likely to produce.