‘I get invited to at least one a week’: The people still breaking lockdown to party

On Hannah’s road in Enfield, north London, there is a house with boarded-up windows. The 23-year-old knows the man who lives there and says he covered up the property so he can continue having house parties without the police being able to see in. He is one of numerous people Hannah knows who has continued having gatherings during lockdown. “I get invited to at least one a week,” she tells The Independent. But, being a healthcare assistant, Hannah has so far avoided going, watching from afar on Snapchat instead. But not anymore. 

The invite is for Saturday night. The party is taking place within walking distance of her mum’s, where she is currently staying. After working a week of 14.5 hour shifts, Hannah has decided she wants to spend time with her friends more than she is worried about the consequences. “The lockdowns are taking a serious toll on my mental health and all I want to do is be able to hug my friends. I go to work and see people die, I need to see people having a good time”.

Hannah says she won’t be completely laissez faire - she will take hand sanitiser, but will break social distancing and hug people: growing evidence shows that airborne particles are far more likely to transmit Covid than touching contaminated surfaces. Hannah isn’t worried about getting ill herself though - “I’ve genuinely come to the conclusion it would be worth it to just feel happy for a few hours” - but has some reservations about giving Covid to others, although she reasons this by saying she is regularly tested at work so would know fairly quickly if she is infected [weekly PCR tests have been rolled out for frontline workers].

But results of tests can take up to 48 hours to process and up to a third of all positive cases are asymptomatic so if she caught coronavirus at the party, Hannah would likely find out too late to isolate before returning to work. She is unconcerned about being caught by the police or fined.

Since March 2020, parties have been off the table. Between three nationwide lockdowns which required people to stay at home, tiered restrictions that stopped household mixing indoors, and - at the most relaxed points - the simple requirement to social distance, gatherings with music and dancing have not been logistically possible. In August, the government announced a crackdown. Party organisers could now be fined £10,000. Then in January, it went a step further when Priti Patel announced additional fines of £800 for anyone caught attending a house party with more than 15 people.

Some people mocked the rules for seemingly condoning smaller gatherings: Piers Morgan tweeted, saying: “Does this mean house parties for 14 people are fine?” While others have joked about messaging from the Home Office not striking the right tone - one tweet in particular shared on 17 February, that said (among other things) that you “shouldn’t make your own pub”, looked as if it could have been taken from an episode of Brass Eye rather than drawn up by government comms. In spite of the jokes, it is clear in many places the law has so far struggled to serve as a deterrent. Nor does the risk to life, even as the UK has now surpassed a death toll of 100,000. At the end of January, this was the largest per capita of any country in the world.

Just three days after Patel announced fines were being stepped up, over 300 people were caught at a rave in a railway arch in Hackney. West Midlands police uncovered a full scale illegal nightclub in Birmingham - complete with neon signs, a dance room, VIP area and 70 guests - and police in Dudley Port found a makeshift pub had been set up with a sign on the wall reading “The Covid Arms”. More recently, Scotland Yard reported that people at an Islington house party had tried to hide their activities when the police turned up by simply turning off a disco ball. 

In Nottingham, 20 people were discovered at a silent disco, where they had organised to listen to music via headphones instead of speakers. Others have even organised parties on boats to avoid detection. Examples of such parties run the entire spectrum from a few friends at a house up to ticketed raves, advertised on social media, particularly Snapchat, and Whatsapp. 

The National Police Chief’s Council issued data on 28 January stating that of the 42,674 fixed penalty notices (FPN) issued in England and Wales between 27 March 2020 and 17 January 2021, just 250 in England had been issued relating to holding a gathering of more than 30 people, and just two in Wales. Throughout the pandemic there has been a narrative that young people have been more likely to be the rule breakers, especially when it comes to parties and going out - a label some of them have embraced, with growing distrust of the government and fears over long-term isolation and financial jeopardy - and of the FPN notices given, the data shows 80 per cent were given to those aged 18-39.

But these numbers struggle to give a real understanding of the scale - none of the people The Independent spoke to had been in trouble as a result of attending a party.

A couple of days after the party we speak again. Hannah estimates there were around 30 guests and although she says there was a communal hand sanitiser, it did not get used. Some people were wearing masks, but under their chins. “I enjoyed it for sure but I can’t deny I had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind knowing I shouldn’t be there. But I am glad I went.”

David*, 29, from Kent, was also not put off attending house parties by either fines or threat of becoming unwell. Throughout 2020, and the various periods of lockdowns and postcode-rules, him and his group of friends continued to meet up at each other’s houses - normally in groups of five or six people. They had not yet been caught and had not contracted Covid, so decided to host a Christmas dinner party at a house, for 13 people, on 12 December.

They each arrived at different times in different cars, going in through a back entrance and an alleyway, not the front door, to avoid being seen by the neighbours. Inside the group played drinking games and no social distancing was adhered to (including lots of shouting and singing). “We were being very loud but just kept the doors closed and lucky it was a detached house [so they weren’t overheard],” he explains.

Then, days after the party, the Whatsapp group lit up with messages from people becoming unwell. In the end, 12 of the 13 guests, including David, tested positive for Covid - this was just as the new strain was spreading rapidly across the south east. “We had spent most of 2020 ‘getting away with it’ and then we got taught our lesson,” he says. “I knew it wasn’t okay but the reward somehow seemed to outweigh the risk.”

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Susie Pinchin, a therapist and member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), explains that the reasons behind people continuing to attend parties aren’t black and white. She says fear and anxiety may be a factor. “As humans, we tend to favour control and structure as it provides a sense of security. When control is taken away from us, rebelling against the rules and going out to a party is exerting control.”

But for others she says it might be a coping mechanism to deal with the magnitude of the situation facing us. “If the fear is overwhelming, the reality that Covid has killed so many people and made so many ill, a coping mechanism can be to minimise it and gathering with others minimises the fear - ‘if I go out with others, we’re all doing it so it must be ok’.”

Pinchin also says that in a party setting you have confirmation bias, which allows you not only to rationalise your behaviour because there are lots of other people breaking the rules in the same way. “If there are groups of like-minded individuals gathering together the pack mentality helps allow power to shift from the individual to the group and the safety in numbers thinking can kick in,” she says.

For Clifford Stott, professor of social psychology at Keele University and member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), he says in this discourse around rule breakers, particularly young people, it is important that we don’t blow things out of proportion and remember that the vast majority of people are adhering to the rules and therefore not causing a problem. “The issue of adherence or compliance has been a perennial one throughout the pandemic and the arguments you will know are well rehearsed. 

“On the one hand you have the idea of the ‘Covidiots’ which basically revolves around the notion that people who don’t follow the guidance are behaving that way through some sort of lack of morality/fatigue/selfishness”. On the other hand he says the data “very clearly” shows that non-compliance is not a major issue as the vast majority are following the rules. So why do we keep feeling like it is and how does society respond to that?

In a paper on the topic, co-authored with Stephen Reicher, University of St. Andrews, and John Drury, University of Sussex, he says that our ‘Covidiots’ viewpoint - that people are inherently fragile and lack the will to deal with pressure.

“At best, they cannot look after themselves. At worst, they exacerbate the original problem through their dysfunctional responses: they strip the shops bare, they demand scarce medical resources that they don’t need, they refuse to abide by measures that are good for them,” he says. The implication of this being that the public is child-like and needs the government to look after them with rules.

But for Stott he says it is crucial to remember that for young people (80 per cent of FPN were given to those aged 18-39), “it is them suffering the most but at lowest risk”. “Their education has been torn away, their employment opportunities denied, their opportunity to socialise taken away. Yet, like the rest of the population the overwhelming pattern is of compliance.”

As the year progresses, police have warned that the number of parties they are uncovering continues to rise, not fall. And with lockdown not ending anytime soon - but Covid case numbers dropping from a post-Christmas high - there is reason to suspect that some people will continue to bend the rules to enjoy themselves, irrespective of the consequences.

For David, one brush with Covid - which meant he couldn’t work for a week and his partner couldn’t see her support bubble over Christmas - was enough to scare him into compliance. But for Hannah, she remains glad she went - “I had missed everyone there so much” - and open to the possibility of another party in lockdown.

*Some names have been changed