ALMOST 5,000 groups have been dispersed by Police Scotland for not following social distancing guidelines - as Nicola Sturgeon said enforcement will become “more challenging” for police as some restrictions are lifted.

Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said that the majority of people are complying with the rules and instructions of officers - as he outlined updated enforcement statistics from March 28 to April 22.

Police have closed 27 premises in Scotland - while officers have carried out 3,646 compliant dispersals and 1,009 dispersals after a warning. A total of 1,637 fixed penalty notices have been issues to members of the public while 112 people have been “forcibly taken home”.

Officers have arrested 78 people for failing to disperse.

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Mr Yousaf said: “I must emphasise that these have been the minority of interactions. The vast majority of interactions, we have seen people comply with the regulations and with the instructions from Police Scotland.

“I speak regularly with the chief constable of Police scotland and I’m reassured and pleased to report  that compliance with regulations remains very high.”

Nicola Sturgeon insisted that one reason why the Scottish Government has been open about its thinking towards an exit strategy is to ensure the public understand why restrictions are being imposed on them.

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She said: “It will always be a concern that every day that passes, people find it harder and harder to comply with these restrictions - I’m finding it harder to not see my family and comply with some of this.

“If you live in a big house and a garden, this is a much different experience to if you live in a flat  with three children and not much space to move about in.

“This is really, really tough but people need to know why we are asking them to do it - which is why I think compliance has been so high.”

She added: “My judgement and my estimate here is that if we continue to be open and frank with people about the reasons for these restrictions, then people will continue to comply because they know it is in the wider interests  and their own interests.

“Where I think we and any government will run into difficulty is if we are asking people to do things and people don’t understand why and they are not necessarily convinced that it’s the right thing to do or that it has the desired effect.

“That’s another reason why I’m so keen for this discussion to be as open and frank as it possible can be.”

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The First Minister admitted that the message to the public “inevitably gets more complicated” as the strategy moves into a phase “where we may be lifting somethings but not others”.

She added: “Right now the message I have to give you  every day is stay at home unless you go out for essential purposes. “If that message suddenly becomes a little more nuanced, we have to take more care in how we get that across and obviously that becomes a more challenging thing for the police to enforce as well.

“If we stop doing it, we’re very quickly going to run into something a lot worse the numbers I’m giving about hospital admissions and intensive care admissions and people dying from this virus are going to start to go up again very quickly and very steeply - none of us want to see this happen, which is why we must keep sticking with this right now.”