Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport: Loneliness
(asked on 7th January 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how much her Department has spent on tackling loneliness in each (a) region and (b) constituent part of the UK in each of the last three years.
DCMS has secured over £20million of new grant funding for organisations across England working on tackling loneliness and bringing people together.
This includes the £11.5m Building Connections Fund (delivered in partnership with The National Lottery Community Fund and Co-op Foundation), which launched in 2018. In addition, The People’s Postcode Lottery has committed £5million of players money to top up its existing grants to charities that combat loneliness, and the Health Lottery has committed £4m to charities that work to improve social links in areas facing disadvantage across England.
Government has since granted an additional £1,369,174 to the Co-op Foundation to tackle youth loneliness via co-design and community spaces.
£2,369,174 of this funding was contributed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
To date, government has spent a total of £6,775,297 on work to tackle loneliness across England through these funds.
The regional breakdown of the Building Connections Fund spend to date is as follows. It is not possible to separate out the DCMS element of this spend:
Region | Total |
East Midlands | £717,560 |
East of England | £841,432 |
London | £1,254,052 |
North East | £933,572 |
North West | £822,266 |
South East | £1,017,672 |
South West | £1,225,764 |
West Midlands | £1,204,668 |
Yorkshire and the Humber | £1,082,361 |
Multi-region / National Projects | £1,049,572 |
The remainder of the £11.5 million is committed to administrative and evaluation costs. So far, £5,406,123.16 of the government contribution of £5,500,000 has been spent. All government funding will be spent by 31st March 2020.
The regional breakdown for the £1,369,174 granted to Co-op Foundation to tackle youth loneliness using co-design and community spaces funding is as follows.
Region | Total |
East Midlands | £112,634 |
East of England | £79,132 |
London | £268,030 |
North East | £171,132 |
North West | £178,578 |
South East | £106,117 |
South West | £180,150 |
West Midlands | £113,406 |
Yorkshire and the Humber | £159,995 |
In addition, DCMS has spent over £1 million on other cross-England work on tackling loneliness as set out in the government’s loneliness strategy, including the Let’s Talk Loneliness campaign, the data pilots with local authorities and the cost of hosting the cross-government loneliness team.
As loneliness is a devolved issue, there has been no DCMS spend in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.