Police will have a “limited” role in enforcing coronavirus quarantine restrictions, with officers taking action against people who breach the rules only as a last resort, according to a briefing plan for police forces. As the 14-day quarantine period came into force on Monday, amid predictions from travel and aviation firms that it could devastate their industries, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) set out enforcement guidance which stressed the often hands-off role for police in the process. Public Health England (PHE) staff will be primarily responsible for checking new arrivals are keeping to the guidelines, which requires them to remain indoors at one address, barring extreme circumstances. Any suspected breaches will be referred to a so-called triage centre run by Border Force with guidance from NPCC staff, who will then direct police to investigate as needed. The briefing for English police forces set out by the NPCC says that even if officers find someone is repeatedly not at the address they have given, or they are not known there, officers will take no immediate action but refer the matter to the triage centre. The guidance does lay out that officers can use “reasonable force” to return someone to their quarantine address, or issue a £1,000 fixed penalty notice, but stresses other options should be sought first. An NPCC spokeswoman said: “Police have a limited role in quarantine regulations.” If there was a need for enforcement, she added, police would “seek to establish the circumstances and we will continue our approach of engaging, explaining, encouraging and, only as last resort, enforcing”. The approach continues a generally hands-off approach to the new rules which some critics of the plan have condemned as potentially undermining their efficacy. But a Whitehall source said it was based on the expected response to the regime: “Most people will be abiding by the rules, so police won’t have to get too involved.” After the first overseas passengers subjected to the new system arrived in the UK, Downing Street said it appeared to be working well. “All of the indications so far is that there has been a good level of compliance and we do expect the vast majority of people to play their part of helping to stop the spread of this disease,” Boris Johnson’s spokesman said. But No 10 is facing pressure from the travel industry, and a number of restive Conservative MPs, to change or scrap the scheme when it is reviewed in three weeks, or introduce a system of “air bridges” to allow overseas holidays this summer. Despite reports suggesting the government hoped to strike a cross-EU deal for mutual travel without quarantine via air bridges by the end of the month, Downing Street said there was no update on this. “We have talked about the possibility of air bridges. And that is something that we are continuing to work on. But nothing at all beyond that,” Johnson’s spokesman said. Speaking to listeners on LBC on Monday, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, suggested that an alternative could be “some sort of testing regime at the airport, with people allowed to travel on if they tested negative for the Covid virus”. Johnson’s spokesman said this might be problematic, as people could test negative for the virus before they were symptomatic. “It can take a significant number of days for symptoms to develop – not just 24 hours,” he said. “So they could potentially have a test at the border, that test could say that they were negative for coronavirus, and then a few days later they may start to develop symptoms, and by that point they may already have been shedding the virus.”