Loneliness and Local Communities

Justin Madders Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I too congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) on securing this debate and on all the work that she and the hon. Member for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy) have done on this agenda in memory of our friend Jo Cox.

As we have heard, loneliness is by its very nature hidden and can affect just about anyone in society, although some groups are more likely to be impacted than others. I do not want to repeat the substance of the many excellent contributions; I just want to reflect on some of the issues I have heard about locally.

I was fortunate enough last week to talk to a number of health and wellbeing co-ordinators in my consistency, and much of what I will say is based on what they told me. The sad truth of the matter is that, for all the effort and focus going into tackling loneliness, there are a number of reasons why the many great initiatives we hear about are not always as successful as we would like them to be.

The No. 1 challenge I heard about from wellbeing co-ordinators was transport. They had a real concern that, although they could refer people to particular groups and activities, in order to access these the patients often rely on public transport or community transport groups, both of which have been decimated in recent years. Part of the issue with transport was not just that the community groups are not as well funded to provide the services, but that there are not enough volunteers to meet demand. That is a common theme in many voluntary organisations. Often, we have fantastic people doing a great job running them. I would like to place on record my appreciation of the great work that they do, but we must remember that these volunteers are just volunteers and they have their own lives, too. Sadly, sometimes things happen in their own lives—illnesses, new caring responsibilities or changes in working commitments—which mean that they can no longer commit the time to volunteering that they would like to. Sometimes, because that person has been the driving force of that particular organisation, the organisation suffers. I would like to see much greater capacity building among volunteers, so that we can overcome these challenges.

It is about putting organisations on a sustainable footing. The question of sustainability also applies to funding. There are lots of pots of money out there to support good causes, but they are often time-limited or for specific purposes and frequently are not able to be used on day-to-day running costs. It is also the case that a certain level of dexterity needs to be applied to actually access the funding in the first place, so I would like to see greater support for people to successfully apply for these pots of money.

There are lots of great people in my constituency who freely give their time to help to tackle loneliness—luncheon clubs, befriender schemes and Men’s Sheds are just three of them—but we have lost other organisations for a variety of reasons in recent times, such as Endeavour, which was doing an excellent job in my constituency in reaching out to older people but sadly had to shut down over the summer. It has not been replaced, which is hugely concerning, and because it is not a statutory service, the only way we will see an equivalent scheme is if there is somebody out there who decides to start another one from scratch. That hardly seems to me a coherent or sustainable way to tackle one of the biggest challenges in our society.