Tier 4 - can I form a support bubble and go stay with my parents?

[yellowtail1]

I live in London with my DH and our 10 week old baby. Can we go and stay with my parents (who live in a tier 2 area) over Christmas by forming a support bubble and if so, how long could we stay with them for? Sorry if this is a stupid question - my head is all over the place and I’m just so confused. Can anyone help?

JFC like I said on another thread, this is worse than Trump's Twitter feed for all the fake news.

Can we report the posters giving the wrong info? Innocent people will be making big decisions based on the advice given here. It's not like asking should I mow the lawn before 8am, this stuff actually matters...

Please don't ask for this advice on social media forums.

YES you can form a support bubble with your household and another BUT it must be exclusive.

Any household woth a child under 1 on the 2nd December can form a bubble with 1 other household on an exclusive basis. You can act as one household until such a point that the rules change

Two families can't form a support bubble. One half of a support bubble has to be someone living alone, so no, you can't.

@Boysgrownbutstillathome

Two families can't form a support bubble. One half of a support bubble has to be someone living alone, so no, you can't.

OMFG. WRONG. Read up before spreading incorrect information.

AND you aren't supposed to leave Tier 4 to go into Tier less than 4.

BUT why would you want to put your family or your parents at risk?

This is too weird. None of the posters giving wrong info seem to have read the thread or ever come back to it. There's an agenda afoot.

This has made my day that this thread is still going . 14 pages! When the answers ‘yes’ was given on page 1.

It’s even better than my local FB page which still has people popping up saying ‘what tier are we?’

No bubbles aren’t for emergencies. I see mine weekly thanks. You make one household.

Amazing how manny people are giving 'advice' but don't actually know the rules. Yes with a child under one you can form a support bubble with another household.
And yes You can cross tier boundaries to be with your support bubble even in lockdown

And so you should; having a new baby during this time is bloody difficult. Maternal mental health is fragile at the best of times.

Congratulations on your baby. I hope you have a lovely Christmas

And mine in t4 me t2.

@SallyB392

AND you aren't supposed to leave Tier 4 to go into Tier less than 4.

BUT why would you want to put your family or your parents at risk?

Visiting someone in your support bubble is one of the exceptions.

Read the thread, check the guidance or risk looking like a Wally giving wrong information.

@MyMorningHairHasItsOwnVlog

This isn’t a game of dodge the rules, it’s a feckin serious life or death measure. Don’t be so stupid. You know you can’t travel outside tier 4 areas and you know “bubbles” are for absolute emergencies. Just forget it’s Christmas and think of the real headlines behind the restrictions.

Shhhh. Who are you to know how much the OP needs some support right now. Babies are hard. There’s a reason they’ve offered this support bubble to new parents, and a reason they haven’t cancelled it. If you’re jealous, stew in your own space.

OP - go right ahead.

@tootyfruitypickle life doesn’t revolve around England. There are three other countries in this UK place. In our country it’s a matter of “extremely vulnerable or extremely lonely” in bubbles. I haven’t caught Covid or know anybody who has caught Covid all because we don’t treat bubbles as a social excuse.

@MyMorningHairHasItsOwnVlog who are you to judge whether anyone elses bubble is valid? Is the test not having caught Covid? I'm in England, my DP and I are in a support bubble living nearly 200 miles apart but neither of us has had it, so I guess that means we're ok

@tootyfruitypickle

No bubbles aren’t for emergencies. I see mine weekly thanks. You make one household.

Yes, exactly!

Thinking about this just now; people need to be quite sure they want to bubble with someone else. It's actually a massive commitment!

@Grenlei go get over yourself and get angry with rule breakers. I agree with @MyMorningHairHasItsOwnVlog. If you keep yourself safe, your loved ones and don’t take unnecessary risks then yeah, if you don’t catch Covid then you can be proud of that. I don’t understand how anyone who locked down properly the first time round caught the virus. I have a really privileged life, btw, I have a crowd of children with special needs who don’t understand social distancing and a husband who can’t work from home. But we wash hands, have worn masks since 17 March and don’t visit family to protect them. I also live in an area which has always been high risk. I’m a smug bitch and proud of it.

Babies under 1 are easy it is us with toddlers that need the support bubbles and extra hand (joke)

Can we tag and report every bloody poster that’s made a proclamation which is entirely false and then never returned... I may head over to site stuff to suggest they need a fact check button.

Also, just because you’ve not formed a support bubble yet, doesn’t mean you cannot. My parents are our bubble - but I’ve still seen as little of them as possible, mostly outside. I’ve limited it to limit the chance of spread, but see my mum just enough to be able to cope with baby + toddler. I’m pushing my limits of coping - just because I’m not round there every day doesn’t make the bubble invalid. Similarly OP and others are entirely reasonable to have coped up until now with the promise of Christmas around the corner, but unable to cope beyond that. Yes, we should all be taking personal responsibility to limit the spread, but the whole point of support bubbles is to prevent a mental health crisis bigger than covid.

I don’t really know why people go on here asking what they can do or should do when it’s obvious they’re gonna do whatever they want regardless?
It was made pretty clear that people in tier 4 should stay home. At the moment, it’s just London and the SE affected by the new strain but in a week or so it will be all over the country because people are determined to find a reason/excuse why they should be allowed to travel.

Everyone saying yes you can is stating old news from before Saturday....as of today, the rules are clear. No Christmas support bubbles or meeting up with anyone if in tier 4. But OP knows this and is just looking for everyone to tell her it’s alright to break the rules.

Gov website:

“ If you live in a Tier 4 area, you must follow the rules below from Sunday 20 December. This means that you cannot leave or be outside of the place you are living unless you have a reasonable excuse. You cannot meet other people indoors, including over the Christmas period, unless you live with them, or they are already part of your support bubble. Outdoors, you can only meet one person from another household.
These rules will not be relaxed for Christmas for Tier 4: you cannot form a Christmas Bubble in Tier 4.”

Please note the last sentence.

I think people are not supposed to stay overnight. Also wouldn’t you be putting your older parents at risk by travelling from a Tier 4 area which is forbidden? It’s not really about trying to get round the rules, it’s about taking personal responsibility to stop the spread involving making sacrifices for the benefit of others. It’s pointless having so many lockdowns when people continue to act in ways more likely to spread the virus.

@Blacksheepcat you're not reading the correct section of the rules. The part about support bubbles which has been linked to multiple times on this thread makes it clear that the OP would be perfectly within the rules to form a bubble with her parents, to visit them and stay overnight, or for multiple nights or to make as many visits as she needed to.

@Mirinska again there is no restrictions on staying overnight with those in your support bubble whatever tier you are in. Also the OPs parents may not be elderly, they might be only in their 40s or 50s.

No one is getting round the rules. The rules are clear that a support bubble is counted as 1 household so you can travel to see them, stay together etc. No bending of the rules, this is exactly what support bubbles are meant for.

@yellowtail1 you can go and stay overnight with your parents. It's in the guidelines on the government website. There's no time limit on how long either. I have a 13 week old dc and will hopefully be bubbled with my parents under the new rules. They took a test today and we are waiting to see if it comes back negative first (they are still working but my DH is wfh and I'm not going out with our dc).

I've copied the wording from the government website for you:

Travelling within a Tier 4 area:
If you live in a Tier 4 area, you must not leave your home unless you have a reasonable excuse (e.g. for work or education purposes). If you need to travel you should stay local - meaning avoiding travelling outside of your village, town or the part of a city where you live - and look to reduce the number of journeys you make overall. The list of reasons you can leave your home and area include, but are not limited to:
• work, where you cannot work from home
• accessing education and for caring responsibilities
• visiting those in your support bubble - or your childcare bubble for childcare

Travelling out of a Tier 4 area:
You must stay at home and not leave your Tier 4 area, other than for legally permitted reasons such as:
• travel to work where you cannot work from home
• travel to education and for caring responsibilities
• visit (including staying overnight with) those in your support bubble - or your childcare bubble for childcare

I found this by simply searching for support bubble tier 4 in google.

Hope that helps.

@whereisthejoy

This post shows how unclear the rules are...

It really doesn't. It shows how motherducking clueless people are. Grenlei et al have posted links to the guidance, explained the guidance and rather than reading the motherducking thread they keep spouting nonsense, even when the post above theirs shows the guidance. Never before has it been more important to RTFT

"I don’t understand how anyone who locked down properly the first time round caught the virus."

Yes I can't understand how my sister who worked with people with covid caught it. I'm guessing you don't work with the public and the luxury of staying home.