The fuzz can’t force you to stop having sex under new coronavirus rules

Police do not have the power to enter your home, despite new coronavirus legislation making sex with someone outside your household illegal from today.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister said that officers will only be able to enter homes ‘where they suspect serious criminal activity is taking place under separate and existing laws’. They therefore will not be bursting into anyone’s bedrooms and fining them on the spot for breaking the new lockdown measures.

The spokesperson added that police officers will continue ‘exercising their common sense and engaging with the public’ as they monitor the new health regulations. They added that fixed penalty notices will only be issued when officers ‘believe it’s a last resort’.

The law change, entitled The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (Amendment) (No. 3) Regulations 2020, was introduced today and prevents people from meeting with a person from another household in a private space.

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Previously, only the person who went inside another person’s home would have been breaching the rules, but now both can technically be prosecuted under the law.

Exceptions to the law must have a ‘reasonable excuse’ to meet privately indoors, which does not include meeting up to have sex. Reasonable excuses include the training of an elite athlete, providing care or assistance to a vulnerable person or key workers, such as emergency services.

Those that must meet in a private space for childcare, separated parents who live in different households seeing their children, those attending a funeral, and vulnerable persons fleeing a risk of violence would also be considered reasonable excuses.

Although officers cannot run house checks under the law, they will still have the power to disperse large public gatherings and ‘issue fixed penalty notices where they feel that is appropriate’, a Downing Street spokesperson told The Mirror.

From today, those in England are allowed to meet in gatherings of six people, so long as they are outdoors and socially distanced. People advised by the government to shield during lockdown have also been given the green light to leave their homes for the first time.

In Scotland, members of two different households are allowed to meet up in groups of up to eight, while Wales will follow similar rules from today. Groups of four to six people who are not in the same household can meet up in Northern Ireland.

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