Loneliness and Local Communities

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Paul Masterton

Wednesday 15th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Reeves]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Jo very much believed that the solution to loneliness is in each and every one of us. We all have to do our bit to reach out to an elderly neighbour who we know is on their own, perhaps particularly at Christmas time, and to phone someone who we think might be struggling. Actions such as that can make a real difference to people’s lives, and I again commend everyone who is doing such work.

There is a stigma attached to loneliness, and a taboo. One reason for the commission is to try to tackle that and to encourage people to talk about their feelings and experiences. Some of us struggle even to tell our loved ones how we are feeling. A Gransnet survey suggested that the vast majority of people would rather share their feelings of loneliness online than with their friends and family. That might be the quintessentially British thing to do, but it also means that too many people suffer in silence. As I said, Jo thought that solving the issue of loneliness starts with each and every one of us. That is why we use the slogans #HappyToChat and #StartAConversation —to encourage people to do just that.

[Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire) (Con)]

I am sorry to interrupt the flow of a wonderful speech. The hon. Lady talks about people not being willing to talk about their feelings—not being happy to chat. As I know, an issue that often arises is that one partner in a relationship can be suffering from loneliness, for example, following the birth of a child, and the other partner is not knowledgeable about or aware of the issue and does not know how to deal with it. That can exacerbate the situation—it can make things worse—and lead to issues in the home, which reinforces how important it is that we are able to talk to each other in our homes.

[Rachel Reeves]

That is absolutely right. Issues of post-natal depression are sometimes linked to loneliness. What should be the happiest time of your life is not always like that for a lot of people. That is the point: a lonely person is not always the figure that we might have in our mind of an elderly lady outliving her relatives. Loneliness is all around us. People who are lonely will be seen as much on a busy street as in the living room of a house with an older person living there. Part of the role of the commission over the last year has been to do just that—to remind people that loneliness does not discriminate and to get people to be more willing to talk about these issues, because only if we talk about them, as we now do much more about mental health, are we likely to solve them.

I want to conclude by saying a little about the Great Get Together and the work that is coming up with the Jo Cox Foundation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) said, 9.3 million people took part in the Great Get Together this summer. The Jo Cox Foundation will be building on that with the Great Christmas Get Together next month, to ensure that no one has no one at Christmastime.

In December, the loneliness commission manifesto will be launched by the hon. Member for South Ribble and me, so that we start to give some of the answers to some of the questions that I have posed today, building on the work that the commission has done over the year, but also with the input from all the hon. Members who speak today and the different groups that they talk about.

Loneliness is a blight on our society, and too many suffer in silence, so it is up to all of us, from Westminster to our constituencies, to come together and take the action necessary, and do Jo proud.