Northamptonshire's top cop admits enforcing the Government's Covid-19 crackdown is going to be "tricky and challenging"

Northamptonshire's top cop admits enforcing the Government's Covid-19 crackdown is going to be "tricky and challenging."

New rules limiting gatherings to six people will become law on Monday in a bid to slow recent rises in coronavirus cases.

Police have been given the task of enforcing the new regulations with the power to issue fines for those not complying — as they were in March when Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a national lockdown.

But Chief Constable Nick Adderley says the new rules will be tougher to handle as the Force are dealing with rising numbers of crimes — and because more people are treating the pandemic too lightly.

Mr Adderley said: "We are now seeing crime and incident levels over and above what we had prior to the lockdown in March.

"Back then we had the capacity to deal with legislation in terms of educating and enforcing some of the Covid stuff.

"We are now at capacity in terms of calls to service which is largely down to the time of year and so on.

Follow Friday's latest County Council media briefing on the Covid-19 situation HERE from 3pm.

"It's time for us to say that everyone has a moral duty to make sure they keep themselves safe.

"We will do what we can, but how much education do we give? We now are at point where there is going to be more enforcement than education.

"It's going to be tricky and challenging but it's the right thing to do.

"Every officer will be told to use discretion and deal with incidents on a case-by-case basis.

"We've done what we can in terms of engage and educate, now we've got to start to push hard and say that if you're not going to comply you are going to force people into local lockdown which will be catastrophic for individuals and the economy.

"In the county we've given up to ten tickets to one individual, others have had six, seven, eight. Education bit and enforcement bit is not working and we are now moving towards the arrest phase where people are not paying these fines. It's crazy but we have to do it."

Northamptonshire County Council will host its latest media briefing on Friday and, hopefully, deliver more details on the Prime Minister's plan to introduce Covid Secure Marshalls to help enforce the "rule of six."

"We wait to see detail of the Covid Secure Marshalls the Government spoke about that will be employed by council and we will be talking to them about our joint approach

"We need to set levels of expectations. We have on our website the ability for people to report incidents of breaches. We will have to triage those but we have large numbers of crimes coming in which have to be prioritised and it will have to be the same with the reports on breaches of Covid legislation."