It is possible to feel lonely in the middle of a large family, in a meeting or marital bed. But when charities and policymakers talk about loneliness, defined by the UK government as an “unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship”, what they are mostly talking about is too many people spending too much time on their own. The evidence for what the murdered MP Jo Cox dubbed a “loneliness crisis” is patchy. But studies have found that 5-15% of older people consistently report feeling lonely often or always. Carers and people with disabilities report high levels of loneliness, as do 16- to 24-year-olds. Three-quarters of GPs in England have at least one appointment each day with someone whose main reason for coming is that they are lonely. Researchers have linked loneliness to mental and physical illnesses including heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
In June the government announced £20m of funding for charities to tackle the problem. Last month it launched a strategy that the prime minister described as “a mission to end loneliness in our lifetimes”. This week Mims Davies, the minister who replaced Tracey Crouch after she resigned in a row about betting, announced that technology giants would be called to account for their role in exacerbating loneliness. All this is refreshing. When our politics has been completely taken over by Brexit to the exclusion of almost everything else, it is a relief to see evidence that the government has some ideas about how to make people’s lives better.
It is also healthy to see ministers take up recommendations made by the cross-party loneliness commission (Ms Cox’s place as co-chair was taken by Rachel Reeves after her death). Non-partisan initiatives should be welcomed in a divided parliament and it is thankfully not too difficult to find some consensus with regard to feelings. No politician wants their constituents to be isolated and miserable.
The trouble is that while everyone has experienced these feelings, creating at least some degree of sympathy for lonely people and policies to reduce their loneliness, the problem hits some groups much harder than others. Evidence shows that people with disabilities and old people are much more likely to be affected. Aiming to reduce loneliness while doing nothing to address the social care crisis, ignoring years of warnings about the impact on vulnerable people of cuts to benefits, and underfunding services from mental health to rural buses, is at best unrealistic. At worst, it could be seen as a distraction. The fatal flaw in the government’s plan is the lack of investment in the public services needed to address the issue.
That doesn’t mean the work that has been done is useless. As has been widely acknowledged since the banking crisis of 2008-09, and with the environmental threats now confronting us, we urgently need measures other than GDP to assess and track human progress. Official attempts to collate data on people’s subjective experience of their lives – happiness back in 2010, loneliness now – are positive. Some of the projects to come out of the strategy will no doubt be valuable to those who take part. While “social prescribing” risks medicalising loneliness, and it would make more sense for councils than GPs to signpost activities such as art classes, this approach is unlikely to do any harm. But the monumental distraction of planning departure from the EU, combined with continuing austerity, means the loneliness strategy is just as unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, to do much good.
