As highlighted on the news yesterday, the police dont actually know the law here. They've been making it up as they go along and got caught out when someone got a direct reply from the cabinet office stating the opposite of the police.
New law empowers police to use force to send people home as confusion continues over safety guidelines
www.theguardian.com
The amount of overreach they've used in this in such a short space of time is scary - it proves they really need checks and balances because left to their own devices they rapidly evolve into a restrictive, arbitrary, petty service.
Google the Derbyshire police drone unit twitter feed as one good example, spend all day doing no useful police work but flying a drone over the empty peak district and the few people they found were all miles from anyone else, obeying all the rules and still got put onto a public shaming video uploaded to twitter. Its quite chilling that these people were obeying all the rules and laws and yet the police thought the best use of resources wasn't stopping groups of kids in parks and bridges or catching up on the alleged huge backlog of work they have, it was the easy targets of law abiding people.
Another force now has an online portal for reporting your neighbours for breaking rules.
Ultimately its FAR safer from a infection risk to drive a few miles to the middle of nowhere than it is to walk from your house where there'll be a lot more people all doing the same.
Last night the government changed the advice to "stay local if possible" but the above incidents were before then.
So don't assume the police (i) know the rules or (ii) will act in good faith. They've been shown to be incapable of it (and that should be remembered when this is all over).