Colleen Fletcher
Main Page: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East) Loneliness and Local Communities
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Colleen Fletcher (Coventry North East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) on securing this important debate.
While none of us is immune to being lonely or socially isolated, we know that older people are especially vulnerable, primarily because they face greater personal or wider societal barriers. In Coventry, which is ranked 59 out of 326 at a local authority level on the loneliness index, it is estimated that more than 3,400 people aged 65 or over are often lonely.
Over recent years there has been a greater focus on loneliness among older people in our communities, and that has been accompanied by a shift in our understanding of its impact. We know there is an established link between loneliness and poor mental and physical health. It affects a person’s wellbeing and quality of life, increases the onset of frailty and functional and cognitive decline, and has serious implications for a person’s mortality and morbidity. The consequences of loneliness are felt not only by the individual directly affected, but by society, through our public services, as lonely individuals are more likely to visit their GP, use A&E services, have higher use of medication and undergo earlier entry into residential or nursing care.
Thankfully, in Coventry there are some faith and third sector organisations that offer preventive, responsive and restorative services, such as the collaborative Good Neighbours Coventry scheme. The befriending, practical support and group activities offered through the scheme can prevent loneliness; but even where problems already exist, it can be responsive to them. Finally, it can be restorative, by helping individuals with entrenched problems to build new and meaningful friendships and regain confidence.
If we are ever to get a grip on this wholly avoidable problem, we need the Government to ensure that adequate resources are available in each and every community to prevent anyone from being lonely or socially isolated—
