Is this allowed under “group of 6”?

[Peasbewithyou]

Can I have 4 friends over one evening (socially distanced - we have open plan downstairs so space isn’t an issue), while DH & 3 kids are upstairs? The kids would be sleeping and DH either watching TV or working. So in the house would be a total of 9 people but on totally different floors and there are toilets on both floors so is it several “groups” so no reason for anyone to come into contact with anyone else.

It seems a bit ridiculous when if we went to a pub there could be another who knows how many people there sitting in groups just a metre or so away!

So would this be legal or illegal?

Ultimately the idea is to minimise contact with others. Laws or not, the virus doesn’t care.

That doesn't really help anything User

This thread is discussing whether OPs gathering is illegal or not. Whether it is moral or not is also relevant.

Whether the law is a big pile of shit or not is also relevant.

The virus presumably does care(??) or rather physically cannot travel over the boundary OP is talking about there existing in her gathering, therefore if your only input is what the virus cares about, OP is presumably in the clear legally, but may or may not be depending on whether you think the law is a big pile of shit or not

I really need to step away from this thread. Can't believe I've become the thread police

Don't understand the point about the multiple gatherings of teens etc... even if you can read the text to say it's technically allowed and therefore cannot be the draftsman's intention, it doesn't prove at all that this means the rule is six per house and nobody else even if there is zero interaction between the extra people with the gathering.
Lilypond is absolutely right, if the rule was six per gathering and per dwelling, it would have been easy enough to draft.

I'm doing similar tomorrow but in the garden. The gathering is all outside, but there is a downstairs loo, my children and husband will be upstairs for the duration and I feel that's totally within the rules. It's the last social event organised and not making any more plans now but this is important to us for many reasons and planned a while ago. Cases in our area are lower than average but on the rise.

Maybe the ministers meant it to be a household rule, but the person drafting it did not want it to stop her book group from meeting

I believe the conclusion here is that the law is ambiguous!

@sleepwhenidie

From government website...no mention of children asleep

When seeing friends and family you do not live with you should:

meet in groups of 6 or less
follow social distancing rules
limit how many different people you see socially over a short period of time
meet people outdoors where practical: meeting people outdoors is safer than meeting people indoors because fresh air provides better ventilation
Limits on the number of people you can see socially have changed. From Monday 14 September, when meeting friends and family you do not live with (or have formed a support bubble with) you must not meet in a group of more than 6, indoors or outdoors. This is against the law and the police will have the powers to enforce these legal limits, including to issue fines (fixed penalty notices) of £100, doubling for further breaches up to a maximum of £3,200.

So ...

If you live with your DP and 3 kids, and have a widow, an elderly aunt, DP's brother, wife, and 2 kids, and another family of 2 adults and a kid in your support bubble, then you can all be together.

👍

Illegal but you can take them grouse shooting instead.

I think you know it's more than 6 OP. Plus you'd have shared kitchen/toilet/bathroom facilities. It's not just about where you sleep.

Lunalulu
So ...

If you live with your DP and 3 kids, and have a widow, an elderly aunt, DP's brother, wife, and 2 kids, and another family of 2 adults and a kid in your support bubble, then you can all be together.

I have no idea how you think your scenario would work. A single oarent/ single person can have a support bubble. But you couldnt go to someone elses house and take your support bubble, but not expect them to count in the numbers.

Your scenario has 14 ppl.

lunalulu are you another one who has completely misunderstood what a support bubble is? Wilfully misunderstood?

Sarcasm maybe? I've had about 3 hours sleep tonight and sarcasm may be harder to spot.

As far as I can see the government bought in this legislation to, in part, make it easier to spot activity which may increase risk of spread and tackle it. It's imperfect legislation created in a hurry.

However it seems clear that if there are 9 people in a house then 9 people are gathering. What's to stop 3 people moving to a different part of the house and claiming that they've been following the law? Nothing.

I highly doubt that the police are going to come knocking on your front door, but if they did, it would be clearly illegal for you to have that many people in your home.

Either obey the law or own that you are doing something which is now illegal. The constant threads looking for loopholes are getting so tired now.

@littlemsattitude

Illegal but you can take them grouse shooting instead.

Or to my child's football training or my outdoor yoga class or one of therapy other outdoor sporting activities that are allowed, picking on shooting is silly and a totally separate issue to covid restrictions.

@Torvean32 as mentioned up thread there would be no need to share facilities. Although I understand that there would be nothing to prove that. No locked doors between the groups of people.

@knittingaddict genuinely not “looking for loopholes”. I was really truly not totally sure I’d this would be illegal or not. I suspected it probably was but I wasn’t looking for ways around the law, just to understand what I need to do to remain within it. I would rather not go to our local pub as pubs have been linked to lots of cases of transmission, so if I do meet friends, I would rather do so at home where we can adequately distance, everything is spotlessly clean and there are not lots of other random people there...

But are you Diane or Alicia?

Alicia, puhlease!

I am sure it has been said before but if anyone wants to have 6 in the garden and some in the house, you would at the least have to have an outdoor toilet. You would also somehow have to avoid mingling which is implausible if there are 6 children in the garden.

• littlemsattitude Illegal but you can take them grouse shooting instead.  Or to my child's football training or my outdoor yoga class or one of therapy other outdoor sporting activities that are allowed, picking on shooting is silly and a totally separate issue to covid restrictions.*

It was just a lighthearted comment, where's your sense of humour ? God knows we need one right now.

It is clear; it is very clear. You just don't want to be inconvenienced. Six. Just six. Just have separate nights and keep to six. It's a pandemic, our movements need to be limited. It really isn't hard to understand at all.

@knittingaddict the Op is not looking for loopholes at all. It's rather worrying that our civil liberties are being eroded so much that a woman who simply wants to enjoy a quiet evening with her friends in her own home is being made to feel bad about it.

I’m really glad OP started this thread. I had 3 girlfriends over for supper in the garden last night. A gathering of 4 . DH was going to be in watching TV and my 2 children were upstairs in bed so NOT part of the gathering and meeting with my friends.
I read the rules and felt this would be fine but one of the ladies was worried so in the end DH went to the pub.
This is a grey area and needs to be clarified.

Any situation where people say 'but I could have a group of 9 and then 3 people could go into another room and say they were not part of the gathering' - that is clearly illegal. If you are one person in a house, and you invite over 8 people, and 3 are in one room and 6 in another, then no-one (i.e. a magistrate) is going to believe that no-one in the group of 6 met with the group of 3.

Here the situation is completely different. The groups will not meet, there is no intention to meet, and it is plausible that they didn't meet.

Take notevenat20's example of a house with 2 teenagers and an adult each hosting a group of 5. Could this be done? Well, possibly, if it was made very clear to everyone up front that there would be other people in the house that it was important they did not meet. If there were staggered start times, staggered end times, strict boundaries, separate toilets, and no one in fact met outside the groups.

Is someone going to believe that is what happened? Depends on circumstances. Ordinarily I would say no, because on receiving info that the house would be like that, it would be odd that some of the 15 people invited to the house would not offer to host, thus removing the need for so many people.

If on the other hand you told me the house was Chatsworth, that each group was meeting in a separate wing in order to decorate one specific room for Christmas, and had separate entrances, I would probably take a different view.

Maybe the law was drafted in order to deal with the fact that some people have very large houses? And possible very separate lives within that house?

Should you do it is obviously different again!

twitter.com/AdamWagner1/status/1306849067893432321

Adam Wagner (human rights lawyer) has a YouTube podcast up discussing the rule of 6. I haven't watched it yet!

TeeBee what precisely is clear?

Nowhere do the rules say 'you must have no more than 6 humans in a house unless they are all permanent residents'.

That would be clear.

It instead says (paraphrasing) 'you may have no more than 6 people gathering in a house for the purpose of social interaction'.

Sleeping children a floor above, not leaving the room, are NOT part of a socially interacting gathering. They just aren't.

To me this is really clear.

If they meant the top version they'd have put that in the legislation. As it is they out the bottom one in, so we can only assume that's what they meant.

This is a bunch of high intelligent people who made this law in collaboration with legal experts! We have to trust that it says what they meant it to say.

And Whydoyouthinkthatthen makes a good point, there is every chance they drafted this law specifically to enable people with gigantic mansions to have much larger gatherings.

Hmmmm, Tories drafting a law to help rich people, where have I seen that before?

Go for it - they are in different parts of the house

Youtube is 30 minutes long and there still isn't long enough to untangle it all. 25 minutes in is the closest it gets but doesn't cover this exactly. He makes the point very clearly that:
Guidance is generally not exactly the same as the law, and generally stricter than the law.
He advises you should stick to the guidance
But you should only be fined if you break the law
I think in the fines bit you can be fined if an 'authorised person' 'reasonably believes' you broke the law.