Around 11mn people living alone or as single parents will be allowed to combine with another household to form a “support bubble” in England, Boris Johnson has said.
The prime minister announced the new easing of social restrictions at his daily press conference in a move to ease loneliness among adults struggling on their own.
The new guidelines will apply from midnight on Saturday.
Under these rules, it will mean single parents and children under 18 that they live with and single adults living alone can go inside one other household and even stay overnight without maintaining social distancing.
A single person household will be able to join together with a multi-person household, so a lone parent could, for example, visit their children’s grandparents in another part of England for help and stay for an extended period.
It will also mean a couple who live apart can meet for the first time during the lockdown, if at least one of them lives alone.
However, any multi-person household will only be able to join with one single-person household, so it would mean hard choices for a group of people living together with partners who live alone elsewhere.
It will also not apply to people told to shield, who are meant to be isolating until the end of June apart from being able to meet one other person outside their home.
There were 8.2mn people living alone last year and 2.9mn lone parent households, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The news is likely to be met with relief from people who live alone but frustration among others who will still not be able to meet loved ones unless socially distancing outside in groups of up to six.
The government has met with criticism for prioritising the reopening of the economy, including zoos, shops and outdoor cinemas, above people’s social contact with their families and the full return of schools.
However, ministers and the scientific advisers have stressed that the biggest risk of transmission is within households rather than socially distanced workplaces, so they have been acting with caution to ease restrictions on families meeting each other.
One exemption to the exclusivity rule will be that parents who are separated can continue to move children between households, so the children of separated parents could potentially be in two separate support bubbles – one bubble for each parent.
Johnson yesterday defended what he called Britain’s “astonishing” efforts to tackle coronavirus, rejecting accusations that with Europe’s worst death toll, his government has nothing to be proud of.
More than 40,000 people are confirmed to have died from Covid-19 in Britain’s outbreak so far, although the figure rises to more than 50,000 when suspected cases are included.
On either measure, the toll is Europe’s worst and the second highest in the world behind the US.
“Last week, the prime minister said he was proud of the government’s record,” Keir Starmer, the leader of the main opposition Labour party, said in the House of Commons.
“But there’s no pride in those figures, is there?”
Johnson said that “we mourn every one and we grieve for them and for their relatives and their friends” — adding however that it was too soon to make international comparisons.
Some experts have cautioned against global comparisons, as each country has different reporting methods and lag times — and the pandemic is far from over.