Roundtable: New Models for tackling loneliness

Helen Lamprell, General Counsel & External Affairs Director, Vodafone

Catherine McClen, Founder, BuddyHub

Moderator: Anna McEwen, Executive Director of Support and Development, Shared Lives Plus

ANNA: Today, we are talking about new models for tackling loneliness. There is something of a stereotype that loneliness only affects older people but it’s a preconception that we need to step away from. In your experience what does loneliness look like?

HELEN: It’s when people lose the sense of community that brings them together. In the UK we’re not very good at welcoming people into our communities anymore. We’ve lost a lot of those hubs where people would gather like the church. It is incredible to look at how many people are affected by loneliness. Our data suggests that 1.5 million people over 65 are chronically lonely in this country.

Obviously, the elderly is an important demographic. Another is new mums on maternity leave. We also found that eighteen to twenty-four-year olds, as a group, are affected by loneliness. It’s a complicated problem that is widespread and nuanced. For example, in the “later-life” category, the experience is extremely different for people who are first retired, missing being surrounded by people in an office, from those who are much older and perhaps losing their social group. Looking at the eighteen to twenty-four group, you might see people who have left school or university, that thing that gives them instant network.

CATHERINE: When I started BuddyHub the stereotypical lonely person was an older person. In some ways it makes sense. There’s something called the lifecycle of friendship, where we tend to make a lot of our friends earlier on in our lives, often through school or tertiary education, through work and through having a family. Our networks tend to increase into middle age and then stabilise. But then as we move towards later life people face transitions of a different nature – leaving work, family or friends moving away, changes in health or situation (such as becoming a carer) and eventually, sadly, friends will start to die.

There are two big risk factors that I see among older people. One is health. Poor health is a real barrier to getting out and doing things that you enjoy or seeing your friends. Conversely, if life circumstances lead to you becoming lonely that will also impact your health. It’s a vicious circle. The other major risk factor is living alone. In the UK about 83.8 million people over sixty-five live on their own, which is a big increase over the last twenty years. How do we persuade people not to live on their own?

So old age certainly puts people at risk of loneliness. But more recently, the data has started to show that loneliness is really striking much younger people, the internet generation. Perhaps they just haven’t interacted in person as much as older generations have done. At BuddyHub about half of those we connect older people with are under thirty. For many of these people the real reason to get involved with us is not because they’re moved by loneliness as a social issue, but because they are feeling that loneliness themselves. They want to increase their social network. There’s also this idea that people really crave intergenerational mixing. So really, loneliness can strike anybody.

HELEN: I find the intergenerational aspect very interesting. You see that in countries like Italy where they have maintained intergenerational living to a stronger degree than in the UK. It’s something that we really must try to reclaim. There’s a great example from the Netherlands of university students living in the same accommodation as older people. It works brilliantly for both. There are a lot of great opportunities out there, but we need to start shouting about them.

ANNA: These schemes certainly have the ability to be beneficial to all generations, not just older people. I’m also interest in the benefit to another stakeholder – business. Why is tackling loneliness an attractive business proposition?

CATHERINE: BuddyHub is a social enterprise, so we combine fair financial returns with impact. We bring high quality services to people who are often excluded from have quality offers available to them, so from that perspective there is a great business opportunity. It’s important to empower people to change their own lies, which is what our service is really about. We run as a membership club with a subscription, which changes the orthodoxy that older people want free services. We just don’t see that, what we see is that people want really good services. They will pay for things that they value, as in any other sphere of the economy. Something that is important to us as a social enterprise, and to me personally, is inclusivity. How do we make sure that all of these technologies and services are in reach to everybody, particularly those on a lower income?

HELEN: We didn’t come at it from a business angle specifically, but so much is at our core. As a business, we connect people. It all goes back to people’s desire to communicate with each other, which is the bedrock of everything we do. What we have seen though, is that by using technology you can do more. We ran a pilot with Mencap to see whether we could run an assisted living programme for people who would otherwise require lots of physical help and care and didn’t have the independence they wanted. We basically created an interface for a variety of different technology solutions that existed already, packaged together into a portal that is very easy to use. The portal gave people the ability to do things for themselves, to live more independent lives, to feel safe when they went out. Something like that could work well in care homes. There is a huge opportunity just in repurposing existing technology. But for us, that wasn’t the rationale for doing something in this space in the first place, it was just a happy by-product.

ANNA: It’s interesting isn’t it, we have this assumption that older people can’t use technology when actually they can. If anything, COVID has accelerated that.

CATHERINE: Technology can be brilliant to nourish friendships. If we don’t do that they will eventually die, and even prior to COVID technology provided a means to do so. The digital literacy angle is interesting. It’s a very individual thing, and many older people are highly digitally literate. Others may not have grown up with technology and actually, they’re not interested. It’s not for them.

Then there are other people who are not digitally literate but would like to learn.

At BuddyHub we created the concept of a Tech Buddy, where somebody will help the older person that they are matched with to embrace digital technology. But something that we need to bear in mind, is that there is a cost for using hardware and software. That can be a real barrier and is often something that is forgotten about in these conversations.

There is another problem with technology that gets right to the heart of what we’re all doing. There’s no point in having WhatsApp or Zoom, or whatever piece of technology you chose to use, if there is nobody to call. At the end of the day, people still need a personal network, and technology doesn’t address the fact that sometimes people don’t have friends or family to contact in the first place.

HELEN: I think that’s at the heart of the conundrum. As you say Catherine, you can use technology to connect people so long as there is somebody to connect to. For me, it’s about shining a light on all of the brilliant resources that are out there and getting them into the hands of the people who need them, as well as getting past the stigma of actually saying “I would like somebody to talk to”. Loneliness is still very stigmatised in this country.

We need to enable people to have these conversations about being lonely. Something I’ve found interesting in the context of coronavirus is the idea of people putting notes through neighbours’ letterboxes offering help. That enabled the breaking down of barriers that in our very reserved British way we might previously have struggled with.

I had a classic example standing outside my house clapping for the NHS. We noticed some people in the drive opposite who we didn’t know and introduced ourselves and found out that they’d moved in the week before. Previously I might have eventually got around to speaking to them, but realistically we all have busy lives and there isn’t much that brings us together physically outside of the crisis. We don’t form communities easily. But now, because we were all standing outside together it offered a chance to connect that I might not have taken a few months ago. We need to maintain that when life returns to some sort of normality.

ANNA: There is a sense of community emerging from the coronavirus crisis that would be great to capture. There are so many people who want to volunteer, whether it is formally or in their community. We need to hold onto that and take it forward. We also need to raise awareness about loneliness and shout about the different solutions available to people. How do we do that?

HELEN: Originally, we were going to build a portal with all the solutions available. But we stopped because the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports have already done it. So there is a fantastic resource out there already that has gathered together loads of different information. One of the challenges is – and maybe I’m wrong here – I don’t think people Google “I’m lonely.” The chances of self-identifying as lonely are quite low. It’s often in retrospect that people realise something was wrong.

CATHERINE: That is absolutely right Helen, we really battled against the stigma of loneliness. We changed our messaging to position the discussion around friendship. There’s an instant correlation for volunteers as they can relate to the story of friendship in their own lives. It also helps us to reach older people. We talk about the benefits of friendship and it’s something that people understand. But I’ve also been touched and surprised by how many older people will openly say “I’m lonely.”

HELEN: At Vodafone I want to make sure that we’re using all of our channels to shout about issues and point people towards the resources that exist. We’ve seen a desire during lockdown for people to help each other, and perhaps in the past we’ve underestimated people’s kindness. If we can galvanise that and tell people how they can help, I think they will. It’s all about communicating the amazing work done by the likes of BuddyHub and Shared Lives, bringing it to the fore and asking people for help. We need to raise awareness that it is not an unsolvable problem.

CATHERINE: I often say that one day I’d love to shut BuddyHub down because it’s no longer needed. But I also have to say that I don’t see it happening in my lifetime. We help to break the ice between strangers, because in reality people don’t just knock on somebody’s door for a conversation. I certainly think that there’s a willingness to do it, people are incredibly kind and there is a lot of goodwill around. But enabling them to do something is the challenge. One of the biggest challenges that has been amplified during lockdown is that people in isolation are very difficult to reach. We’ve seen with the NHS volunteering drive that finding people who want to help is the easy bit. Finding the people who need the support is the challenge.

ANNA: I remember a few years ago when a neighbour asked me for help. His wife had a fall and so I went in and called an ambulance as any neighbour would do. I went to check on them a few days later and the care assistant made me feel as though I wasn’t allowed to be involved because I wasn’t part of a formal organisation. But I was just doing the neighbourly thing. So how do we enable that community and neighbourly connection alongside the more formal support that has the process and safeguards around it?

HELEN: There’s always going to be space for the organised response and we definitely need that. But I think we also need to give people ideas about how they can participate at an informal level. There are a lot of lovely stories on Twitter right now about people cooking for their neighbours and things like that. There are business ideas like Good Gym – you go for a run and you bring somebody a bag of groceries on the way – a lot of those organisations are making a good response the norm. You can drive other people’s behaviours by inspiring creative thinking and normalising the idea that we all contribute. If we can do that, I think we start to solve the problem at a grassroots level alongside the planned interventions that are necessary.

CATHERINE: It’s interesting to frame this discussion in the context of lockdown. I think lockdown has given many people the experience of loneliness and isolation that they may have not had previously. The silver lining is that there may be more support now for people who were already in that situation. Another is that people may experience the rewards to volunteering, and at least for some of them, it might carry on beyond the pandemic. We’ve all been struck by the immense kindness out there. In my own experience, I always feel I’ve got more out of volunteering than I put in. I call myself the selfish volunteer. It’s a bit of a USP for the voluntary services, that once people start, they get a taste for it and keep going. Maybe it will be informally, maybe it will be through organised services, I think you’re right Helen, in that there will be a mix.

ANNA: There’s really a demand for awareness raising on two levels. One, on the solutions available to lonely people at an organised level like BuddyHub, Good Gym and Cares Family. The other, helping people who want to volunteer but don’t have the opportunity or channels to do so.

CATHERINE: Something that we haven’t yet addressed is the importance of prevention. How do we stop creating more lonely people as we move through time? Humanity developed in villages, and as we become increasingly urbanised there has been a breakdown in community. I think this is where we need to come back to technology and look hard at the role that technology plays in our society. There is a lot of good. When the telephone first came along it was a brilliant solution for keeping people connected. But there is also cause for concern. You might say that younger people - that eighteen to twenty-four bracket that Helen mentioned earlier – have become too reliant on virtual communities and are craving physical contact. I feel very concerned about younger generations. The data that is coming through suggests that people are not developing the social skills that we need to interact face to face.

HELEN: I totally agree. It has become a defence mechanism – “I don’t know anybody, quick, get my phone out.” Putting the phone down is just as important as having access to it for social connections. We have a Digital Parenting Guide which encourages people to put down their phones and talk to the person next to them. It’s absolutely vital because while I love technology, I love what it can do, it can be a barrier to face-to-face communication. We need to make sure that a balance exists.

One of the interesting things we’ve noticed at Vodafone since the outbreak of the pandemic is the amount of extra voice coverage. We’ve seen a forty percent increase in people making voice calls on their mobile. So, speaking of silver linings, I think people are beginning to rediscover the lost art of talking to one another. Let’s hope we can capitalise on that as a country as we begin to move to a post-COVID world.

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This article is an extract from the Longevity Trends Report 2020 - mid year update

The report captures Longevity Leaders' extensive research into this space, including the most important longevity trends of 2020 that businesses, policy makers, scientists and the general population need to be aware of.

Download the full Longevity Trends 2020 Report