LONDON — Many residents of the United Kingdom woke up in a state of mild confusion Monday after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a tentative road map for loosening coronavirus restrictions.

In a special televised address Sunday, Johnson outlined a series of conditional and staggered steps beginning this week for exiting the lockdown and encouraged those in England who are unable to work from home, including factory and construction workers, to return to work.

Johnson said that starting Wednesday, the government will allow unlimited outdoor exercise and in June some shops may reopen and some age groups may be able to start to return to school.

But while the measures will be a welcome relief to many in the U.K. who have been largely restricted to their homes for the past seven weeks, the statement also drew criticism from opposition parties and trade unionists for its apparent lack of clarity.

Overnight opinion polling revealed confusion among the general public over what Johnson’s new “Stay Alert, Control the virus, Save lives” slogan actually means.

The plans also prompted disagreement between the different parts of the United Kingdom as the elected leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, said they would stick with a simple “stay at home” message rather than pivoting to Johnson’s newly-unveiled “stay alert” slogan.

“The new slogan introduced by the Prime Minister for the people of England, to ‘Stay Alert’, is, I am afraid to say, vague and imprecise,” Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, wrote in an op-ed in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. On Sunday, she pinned a tweet reinforcing Scotland’s message to “Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save lives,” to the top of her Twitter feed.

The new leader of the left-leaning opposition Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, was equally critical.

“What the nation was looking for this evening was clarity and consensus,” he said. “The truth is, the Prime Minister’s statement raises more questions than it answers.”

Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, a federation of trade unions in England and Wales, described Johnson’s statement as a “recipe for chaos.”

“Govt still hasn’t published guidance on how workers will be kept safe. So how can the PM — with 12-hours’ notice — tell people to go back to sites and factories?” she tweeted on Sunday.

More details are due later on Monday, with further guidance for employers and a statement in the House of Commons from the prime minister.

But in the meantime, many Britons were left scratching their heads.

A YouGov poll published Monday found that only 30 percent of the British public understood what the new “Stay Alert” slogan was asking them to do, compared to 91 percent who said the previous slogan “Stay home, Protect the NHS, Save lives” had made it clear.

The poll of more than 6,500 people also found that the population was divided over the measures with 44 percent saying they support the move and 43 percent saying they were opposed.

And as the criticism mounted, satirists seized the opportunity also.

“So we are saying don’t go to work, go to work, don’t take public transport, go to work, don’t go to work,” comedian Matt Lucas said in a video which was liked over 130,000 times on Twitter.

Reuters contributed to this report