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Covid was firmly back on the agenda in October, with its impact starting to having a biting effect on the job market.
Those breaching the isolation rules were also handed heavy fines.
A Havre des Pas hotel, for example, was fined £20,000 after repeatedly breaching public health guidance introduced to contain the spread of covid-19, which included playing loud music, failing to ensure physical distancing, and holding events with more than 40 guests. The Marina Metro Hotel was the first business to have been referred to the Licensing Assembly for such breaches.
Pictured: The Marina Hotel was fined £20,000 for repeated covid breaches. Credit: Google Maps.
Two visitors from the Netherlands, who were staying in Gorey, were fined £800 each for failing to quarantine after arriving in Jersey, and a 22-year-old woman who flew to the island from the UK and was caught failing to isolate after posting about a visit to a restaurant on Instagram was fined a not-insignificant £6,600.
After previously being able to track all cases back to a single source, usually a new arrival to the island, the Health Department admitted that it was investigating how one islander got infected with covid-19 after failing to find a potential source, in the first suspected case of community transmission since the borders reopened.
At the time, most cases could still be attributed to arrivals to the Island, something that would shift considerably in the final three months of the year.
Pictured: Ports of Jersey was forced to lay off 15% of its workforce after a 90% fall off in passenger numbers.
Ports of Jersey announced that it would be cutting up to 65 jobs to help it cope with the impact of corona virus. Facing a 90% drop in passenger numbers, and huge uncertainty over the future of sea and air travel, the States-owned company said that it was cutting up to 15% of its 420-strong workforce through voluntary redundancy and early retirement.
Midway through October, with the number of known cases hitting 61, ministers said that Jersey’s borders would close “by default” as covid cases in the UK and Europe continued to rise. Their comments followed calls from some islanders to close the island to all but essential travel – as it had done during lockdown – after virus case numbers exceeded 60 following a spike of 30 over one weekend.
The biggest political scandal of the year broke at the very end of the month when it was revealed that Jersey’s top civil servant, Charlie Parker, had taken on a £50,000 second job as a non-executive director at a real estate company with a £1.2bn portfolio – in a move the Government claimed would “inform Jersey’s economic recovery from covid-19.”
The fall-out and subsequent blunders and recriminations would dominate November but the touch-paper was lit in October.
Pictured: Overdale was named as the ministers’ favourite site for a new hospital, which they said could cost more than £800m.
In other perennial news, Overdale was named as the preferred site for the new hospital. The total potential cost of building it was revealed as up to an eye-watering £804m. While the maximum cost of building the facility would be set to be £550m, a States proposition showed that the project carried ‘additional costs’ of up to £254.5m, including acquiring extra sites (£25.3m), relocating services currently operating at Overdale (£5m), demolishing the current hospital (£7m), and a contingency fund (£174.3m) to account for any unforeseen issues that may arise.
Finally, Jersey looked to be on course for a serious constitutional clash with the UK government after they took the “unprecedented” and “provocative” step of adding a last-minute clause to its Fisheries Bill without the island’s consent.
The ‘Permissive Extent Clause’ (PEC), which was slipped into the bill shortly before the House of Commons passed it in a vote, paved the way for the UK to exert greater control over Crown Dependencies on fishing matters post-Brexit.
Despite strong words from External Relations Minister Ian Gorst, the UK government steamrollered the clause in, leaving a bitter taste in the mouth of many Islanders.
January, the calm before the storm
March, it hits and we lockdown
August, court cases, real housewives and grenades
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