National Police Lead for Civil Contingencies Paul Netherton Speaks About the Importance of Lockdowns

The national police lead for civil contingencies, Deputy Chief Constable Paul Netherton, has told Times Radio it's vital lockdown restrictions are not broken.

Speaking to Gloria De Piero and Tom Newton Dunn he said:

The purpose of staying at home is that you are restricting the spread of the disease. We've got to stop people coming into contact with each other. And therefore just wandering around shops, without shopping for purpose, getting the food and going home again, you are beginning to create a greater risk of people catching this disease. We are losing over 1-thousand people a day and however much the police don't want to be seen as draconian in this country and policing with consent...we have to try and get people to abide by these rules. Otherwise people are going to die.

On public confusion over the tier system of restrictions:

As the various lockdowns have taken place, as we went into tiers the message became confusing and we all understand that. It was varied across the country. You had differences between England and Scotland and Wales and obviously that meant the public started to think, oh it's okay that I can go out more, I can do more. Now we've entered a second national lockdown, or third I should say; a more intense one, we really have to adhere to that message: stay at home. And that's where the police have been asked to step in. So we are still using that "Four E" approach. So we will engage people, we will explain to them why the message is important, why they need to stay at home. And we will encourage them to go back home or to abide by the rules. And only when they are blatantly breaching them, will we then use enforcement.

On issuing penalty notices to those breaking lockdown rule, after one warning:

I think that's what the government are expecting and to be honest that's what we should be saying to the public. Everybody knows what the rules are. This is no longer about people not understanding what they should be doing. We've been in this situation for a year now. The police don't want to be the draconian sort of people stopping people just as they go for a walk from their house. People need fresh air, they need to do some form of exercise. But when they're using that as an excuse to travel 150 miles to Snowden, to climb, Snowden for the day, or as another one I heard today travelling to the coast to 100 miles to see a seal colony, these are blatant breaches of stay at home rules. Telling people to go home and then not abiding; I think that it's justifiable to then enforce a fine if they don't adhere to it.