Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the appropriateness of the language used for different cultural and linguistic groups in measuring loneliness in their loneliness strategy.

A national loneliness measure was announced in October 2018 as part of the loneliness strategy.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) undertook a programme of scoping work to recommend a way of measuring loneliness which would work for people of different ages and backgrounds, including how different loneliness measures compare for use with diverse ethnic groups, including those with limited English.

ONS’s final recommendation of using both direct and indirect measures of loneliness where possible is an approach currently taken by the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and the Understanding Society study. The recommended measures are well-tested across different surveys and demographics.

ONS worked with the Loneliness Technical Advisory Group to identify a range of criteria regarding the design, sample and geographical coverage of the surveys in which the measure will be included, to build opportunities to improve understanding of differences between ethnic groups.