The “support bubble” is a new legal concept that emerged during the pandemic. Sarah Trotter (LSE) examines how she merged a number of relationships and then transformed them into a new legal form. So, can grandparents now visit their grandchildren and let them live in their own homes? A grandparent who lives alone may form a bubble with one of their adult children. But families with two single grandparents have to choose which grandparent to bond with. The UK also introduced support bubbles in 2020 as part of a broader strategy to ease lockdowns: from 13 June in England and Northern Ireland, 19 June in Scotland and 6 July in Wales. The main target was, at least initially, people living alone. While New Zealand has always had a lockdown “buddy” system for people living alone, the UK has not. As Boris Johnson (2020a), the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stated in order to “stay at home” on March 23: “You should not meet friends. If your friends ask you to meet, you should say no. You should not meet family members who do not live in your home.
“The point is interesting because it highlights deeper questions about personal relationships that are important in (and after) law, and how those relationships are legally constructed. For example, the slightest consideration of the idea of legally recognizing and regulating friendship raises a multitude of questions about the form it would take. What about parents who have separated but have children under the age of 18? They are already allowed to work as in a bubble. Adults who live alone or only with dependent children can now form a bubble with another household. This section was amended on June 19, 2020. Parents who have separated and live only with dependent children can form a bubble with another household – which does not need to contain a single adult, as an earlier version said. Everyone in a support bubble essentially counts as a household. If possible, you should avoid changing your support bubble.
This will help prevent the spread of the virus between households. This section was amended on June 19, 2020. Parents who have separated and live only with dependent children may form a bubble with another household – which does not need to contain a single adult, according to an earlier version. The government adds: “If you share custody of your child and you and your child`s other parent are both in separate bubbles, all households should self-isolate if one member of the group develops symptoms.” If you`re in a support bubble of more than six people, you can still socialize together, but not with someone else at the same time. A support bubble is a support network that connects 2 households. He adds that support bubbles should be formed with households living locally whenever possible to prevent possible transmission of the virus between different areas. You can only form a support bubble if you follow certain admission rules. Not everyone can form a support bubble. Talking about relationships in terms of “gender” is not without its problems; It is a reductive mode of expression that neglects the specificity of a given relationship and subjects it to a certain form. However, relationships are categorized according to their “nature” in law, and the concept of a support bubble raises three questions about the types of relationships it has brought together. First, types of relationships that had not necessarily attracted much prior legal attention – such as friendships and romantic relationships – found a place in law by receiving some level of legal reflection and recognition. Second, the bubble concept was constructed around the household unit and, therefore, shaped by normative assumptions about households and relationships within and between households (Gulland, 2020; Lang, 2020; Trnka and Davies, 2021).
Third, the relationships encapsulated and made possible by the concept of a support bubble would not normally have been classified together or treated as legally comparable. The legal concept of the support bubble was characterised by the approximation of various fiscal and interbudgetary relationships. Then they were recast into a new legal type: the type of support. The support bubble thus presented itself not only as a “new corporate form” (Long et al., 2020, p. 55), but also as a new legal form. More information about bubbles can be found on the government website here. Jackie Gulland (2020, p. 336) also highlighted how the UK`s lockdown regulations had neglected lived reality, arguing that they were structured by two visions: on the one hand, they were “limited by the assumption that care takes place in the public, private and charitable sectors or that it can be contained within a household”; On the other hand, they included “sustained concentration. on households as autonomous, safe, adequate and protected, obscuring the interdependence of human life, gendered aspects of care and inequalities in housing and living conditions”. In New Zealand, Susanna Trnka and Sharyn Davies argued in the same way (2021, p. 2021, p. 168-171), that while exceptions to the original family relationship model “contribute greatly to recognizing that families are not necessarily assigned to a single household,” the bubble concept itself “did not allow for the breadth and variety of care relationships that span multiple households”; Nor have they “adequately met the needs of those who live alone or with others with whom they have little or no economic or social ties.” I chose my bladder.
Is there anything I can`t do? You can`t change your mind. You cannot swap or expand bubbles to include more than one household. You can change your support bubble if necessary, for example, if your situation or that of your existing support bubble changes. The support bubble concept was developed in New Zealand. It was introduced as part of the four-tier COVID-19 alert level system announced on 21 March 2020 (New Zealand Government, 2021b). On 25 March, and after a 48-hour notice period, New Zealand moved to the highest alert level (alert level 4), resulting in a national lockdown during which “the entire nation isolates itself” (New Zealand government, 2021d). People “outside of essential services” were asked to “stay at home and stop interacting with others outside their household” (Ardern, 2020a). The introduction of the bubble concept followed almost immediately, with residents being informed the next day that for the duration of self-isolation, they had to “hold on to [their] bubble,” whatever it was (Devlin & Manch, 2020). 9 days later, on 3. This order was formalised by an isolation order issued by the Director General of Health under section 70 § 1 (f) of the Health Act 1956. In a subsequent challenge to the legality of the original stay-at-home order, the High Court of New Zealand (High Court of New Zealand, 2020) found that the relevant news from 26 March to 3 April had effectively unlawfully restricted certain rights and freedoms under the 1990 New Zealand Bill of Rights: namely, the right to free movement, Freedom of assembly and association.
The Court held that, although the requirement of residence in the country had the effect of restricting those rights, the requirement itself was not prescribed by law. From the beginning, the concept of the bubble was inextricably linked to assumptions about the domestic unit to which it was linked. Households were constructed as largely limited in this context, although care and life are not so limited. As Long (2020) went on to argue in relation to the UK`s first national lockdown: All members of both households must agree to this regulation. Children living with a parent or person with parental responsibility do not have to accept the food bubble agreement. Yes, you can have both a support bubble and a childcare bubble, but only if you meet the conditions that make you eligible for education. However, each screening worker was advised not to bubble and to stay two metres away from all other households and avoid social contact. If you develop symptoms, you should alert members of your bladder or other people with whom you have had close contact in the past 2 days.