The 1750 pounds package includes an individual hotel room, direct transport from the airport or sea port and two tests, on the second and eighth quarantine days, which can be extended if one of the results is positive.
Violation of the rules could incur a fine of between £ 1,000 and £ 10,000 (1140 and 11,400 euros) and people who omit on passenger forms have been in one of the approximately 33 risky countries in the previous 10 days are subject to imprisonment until 10 years.
"I do not apologize for the robustness of these measures because we are dealing with one of the biggest threats to public health that we faced as a country," said Matt Hancock in parliament.
The so-called "quarantine hotels" will start operating on Monday and affect passengers arriving from 33 countries from which direct flights have been suspended and visits banned, with only British nationals and resident foreigners allowed.
The list includes Angola, Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, as well as dozens of African and South American countries due to the risk of transmission of variants B1128, detected in Brazil, and B1351, detected in South Africa, against which scientists fear that anti-covid vaccines are less effective.
So far, international passengers have been quarantined in their own home, to which they can travel using public transport, but the government is under pressure to tighten border restrictions to prevent more cases of the variants from arriving.
Labor Party leader Keir Starmer considers the South African variant "the greatest threat" the United Kingdom faces and said on Monday that it is important to "protect the borders" due to concerns that the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine may be less effective against that variant.
The remaining passengers arriving in England from lower risk countries will also have tighter rules starting next week, namely additional tests on the second and eighth day of mandatory quarantine, which will be extended if they are positive.
Anyone arriving from England abroad must also present a negative test carried out 72 hours before departure.
Hancock said he was in contact with the autonomous governments of the other regions - Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - as well as with Ireland, a country with which he has a free circulation area, to coordinate and adopt similar measures.
The United Kingdom is one of the countries most affected by the covid-19 pandemic, having recorded more than 112,000 deaths, the highest number in Europe and the fifth largest worldwide, behind the United States, India, Brazil and Mexico.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 2,325,744 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 106.4 million cases of infection, according to a report made by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 14,354 people died from 767,919 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
