And therefore I call on Joyce Watson to move the short debate tabled in her name—Joyce Watson.

Diolch, Lywydd. I will be talking today about loneliness, and I’m pleased to allow time for both Eluned Morgan and Mark Isherwood to make contributions and I look forward to hearing the Minister or the Cabinet Secretary response.

I was prompted to table this debate by two things. First, an e-mail that I received before Christmas from the British Red Cross. The charity has teamed up with the Co-op to help people in Britain whose lives are diminished by loneliness. They have published a comprehensive report called ‘Trapped in a bubble’, and will be launching four new projects in Wales—one in Carmarthenshire, Conwy, Newport and Torfaen. Then, shortly after Christmas, I read a report about the launch later this month of the commission on loneliness, which was devised by the late Jo Cox and Seema Kennedy MP.

The Deputy Presiding Officer took the Chair.

It is a truism that, at Christmas, we feel more together with other people, but more alone when we’re lonely. So, these stories struck a chord. Before her untimely death, Jo Cox helped gather evidence about loneliness in different parts of society: children who are desperately sad, new mums, isolated disabled people, men suffering from depression, and older people. And her work lives on, picked up by Rachel Reeves MP. Academics and charities, including the Campaign to End Loneliness, Age UK, Action for Children, the Co-op and British Red Cross, the Royal Voluntary Service, and Sense, have contributed to the commission. Their evidence shows that more than 9 million people in Britain, almost a fifth of the population, say they are always or often lonely. The Red Cross and Co-operative research supports that figure. Nearly one in five people are always or often lonely, they say. ‘Always or often lonely’—to me, that is an extremely sad phrase, a shocking figure. But what can we do about it? Loneliness is part of life. It was the American writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau who wrote:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’

People have described this as the age of anxiety. But we can act, and we should act, because loneliness and social isolation is a public concern, as well as private unhappiness. For one thing, it is a public health issue. Loneliness is associated with physical symptoms like hypertension, heart disease, depression, mental ill health, drinking and substance misuse. We debated obesity earlier this afternoon, and some research will suggest that loneliness can be as damaging to health as obesity or smoking. So, there is a clear public health argument. More broadly, loneliness is a combination of personal, community, and wider societal issues. It negatively impacts upon communities as well as individuals. People withdraw. They become disengaged. They contribute less. They take time off from work. So, it affects everyone directly or indirectly. As the title of the debate suggests—’Hidden in Plain Sight’—loneliness is a problem in every street, in every neighbourhood, and probably in nearly every family.

So, how do we tackle it? First, we have to identify it, and that is where the commission and the research can help massively. The Red Cross and the Co-op research shows that nearly three quarters of those people who said they were always or often lonely fall within the one of six categories that are linked to changing circumstances or life’s events. And they are: being a young mum, those with health issues, the recently bereaved, people with mobility limitations, people who have recently divorced or separated or retired, and people living without children at home. What is clear is that loneliness doesn’t have one simple cause. So, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, a mix of activities are needed to prevent these issues, to respond to the experience of those people, and to restore the confidence of those who have been affected for some time.

Age, of course, we all know is an obvious and well-documented risk factor for loneliness. In its submission to the commission, Age Cymru last November surveyed over-60s in Wales, and the results highlight the importance of things like affordable transport to and from social events, lunch clubs, social clubs, and face-to-face visits. That is why people continue to campaign passionately to save services like their local day centres, and why the Labour group on Powys council have also campaigned, and others continue to campaign elsewhere right across the piece. And it is why the Welsh Government’s decisive action to save the bus service between Aberystwyth and Cardiff was vital. I’m sure that the Minister or the Cabinet Secretary will talk more about the Welsh Government’s commitment to supporting our resilient communities. That word, ‘community’, tends to be overused, and it’s applied too loosely. I wince when I hear such things as ‘a mortgage-lending community’. But community—the true meaning of ‘community’—is integral to Welsh life, and I strongly believe that.

Rurality is another risk factor for loneliness and social isolation, prevalent in my own region, though, of course, people can be isolated without being lonely, and they can be lonely without being isolated. Transport and facilities are especially important in a rural setting but so too is a good internet connection, and Superfast Cymru has helped in some aspects. But, again, what’s clear from the commission’s research is that loneliness touches all parts of society: women and men, urban and rural, old and young. ChildLine has helped more than 4 million young people, with more and more coming forward in recent years to confide how desperate and sad and lonely they feel. Social media is, of course, a great way to keep in touch, but is not a substitute for talking to people face to face. It can often make people feel more lonely, and it can amplify how connected other people are, or appear to be.

So, we do need a holistic approach to tackle loneliness, one that, undoubtedly, will have to cut across policy areas and Government departments, both locally and nationally. For the next two years, the Red Cross will provide direct personalised support to 12,500 people in 39 locations in Britain, including those four areas in Wales that I said earlier—Carmarthenshire, Conwy, Newport and Torfaen. Teams of dedicated community connectors and support-at-home staff and volunteers will deliver specialist psychosocial support, safeguarding and assistance to people experiencing loneliness and social isolation. They will provide 12 weeks of intensive person-centred care, identifying activities, interest groups, and local services to help people gain confidence.

I’m looking forward to visiting the Carmarthenshire project, where nearly a third of the population live alone. One service user there, Janet—not her real name—was referred to the Red Cross last spring, having recently suffered a stroke that inhibited her walking. Although she’d suffered with anxiety before the stroke, since she had developed agoraphobia and panic attacks. She had not left her house, even out of the back door, alone since her return from hospital several weeks prior. She wanted to be able to walk to the end of the driveway one day to greet her husband when he came home, and she also wanted to be able to visit her son in Copenhagen at Christmas and to be able to walk independently from the train to her son’s apartment, which was about 400m. Janet was introduced to a Red Cross volunteer, Heather, and they got on well straight away. Heather started visiting her weekly and they would practice going outside the front door, just standing there, and coming back in. In a very short period of time they went in Heather’s car for a visit to the coast, at Janet’s request, and her confidence grew. Soon after, they were walking along the driveway, and Janet started walking it alone, with Heather standing at the other end. By the time Heather’s support stopped, after the three months, Janet was using her mobility scooter to go longer distances alone to the local post office, and she was regularly practising walking alone. And she did, yes, manage to visit her son in Denmark at Christmas.

Age Cymru also do tremendous work in this area and they are launching a new major campaign soon. So, what can we do here in the Assembly? What can the Welsh Government do? Loneliness spans lots of policy areas, as I say, but by formulating and scrutinising more policy and legislation through the lens of loneliness and social isolation, we can begin to tackle it more effectively. That’s the politics. But personally, we can all act and we can all do more. As the Christmas glow fades and the winter chill remains, we could, actually, start a conversation: we could pick up the phone and talk to an elderly or isolated relative and we could, actually, make time for people.

I thought that was a very moving introduction by Joyce Watson and I’d like to thank her very much, not just for that presentation but also for initiating this discussion today.

I think loneliness is a curse, really, particularly for the old and that’s the point that I’d like to focus on because I think, with more people moving away from where they were brought up, they leave their parents and people are left alone. That is particularly true, I think, in rural areas, where we have to be, I think, particularly sensitive. But we are now in an age of austerity and we know that, although the situation is bad now, actually it’s probably going to get worse. We’ve been told by our own finance Minister that local authorities are going to have to tighten their belts in future—it’s been generous this year, but we need to prepare.

The consequence, I’m afraid, of austerity being imposed by the UK Government on Wales and on local authorities is the closure of care homes. That is a lifeline for people who are suffering loneliness. I think we’re going to have to rely more, I’m afraid, in future, on neighbours, on communities, on voluntary organisations, to help out local government in these instances. This doesn’t mean that Government vacates the field. It’s really important that there is a role for the state, but I think that, perhaps, what we should be doing is creating a better infrastructure for us to be able to support volunteers. I think it would be useful to establish a single telephone number, for example, where people across the whole of Wales could phone and then there would be a machine, effectively—a machine of people fielding calls to the correct voluntary organisation. I think in this way, we could be alleviating loneliness, but also helping people practically. Changing light bulbs—you don’t want an old person changing a light bulb because they could fall, break their hip and that will have an impact on the NHS. It’s so much easier for us to help them out.

It was a minute’s contribution, sorry, and you’ve had longer than a minute.

Okay, just one more thing and that is to mention—

Okay, very quickly then.

[Continues.]—the need, I think, to provide a long-term funding framework to help organisations that are taking pressure off the NHS and care services. I wonder if the Minister would consider better funding and a long-term funding framework rather than an ad hoc process that happens at the moment.

Last Friday, I visited the British Red Cross Abergele office to hear more about the Community Connect project to tackle loneliness and isolation and reconnect people with their communities, which Joyce Watson referred to, benefiting from the partnership between the Red Cross and the Co-op. This is because Conwy was one of the four areas that you referred to with 32 per cent of people living in single-person households and 25 per cent aged over 65. But, as you indicated, this is for people of all ages, and not just older people—to help them break that cycle of loneliness and isolation and reconnect them with their communities.

Personalised Red Cross support also includes schemes like Positive Steps to improve the lives of people over 50 across Wales, with eight weeks of intensive support, followed by volunteer-led, longer-term support in the community from RVS Cymru.

Above all, without the right support at the right time, feeling lonely or isolated affects well-being, it contributes to poor health and pressure on public services, so people must be helped co-productively, to identify the strengths they already have in order to tackle the problems holding them back.

I now call on Jane Hutt to reply to the debate.

Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’m very grateful to Joyce Watson for giving us the opportunity to discuss the challenges we face in tackling the issue of loneliness in our Welsh communities. Our communities have traditionally been, and continue to be, places where people look out for and help each other. But, as society changes, a growing number of people are experiencing social isolation and loneliness in our cities, towns and villages. Where, once, generations of the same family would have lived their lives within miles of each other, in the same street, the same community, today, members of the same family are often scattered across the country or even scattered across the world as they pursue work opportunities or start their own families. As a result, the older generation may be left behind, as Eluned Morgan highlighted in her contribution.

Loneliness and isolation, of course, isn’t just a phenomenon associated with ageing. We all experience periods of loneliness and, as is very clear and has been highlighted in this debate, loneliness and social isolation pose a major public health risk—often referred to as the silent killers, often associated with poor mental health, with cardiovascular disease, hypertension and increased risk of dementia. The Welsh Government is determined to tackle loneliness and social isolation in Wales and we’re committed to developing what has to be a nation-wide and cross-Government strategy to address loneliness and isolation. But, it has to encompass not just Government nationally and locally—local government are playing their role and the health service—but the third sector and our communities as well.

There are a number of community-based approaches to supporting people who have become lonely and isolated and they’ve been mentioned today. Joyce has brought them to the fore in this debate. It’s important that our strategy, any Government strategy, promotes sustainable models that are integrated in communities. We’re already taking action to tackle loneliness and social isolation in Wales through a range of programmes and initiatives and some of these have been mentioned. The previous Minister for Health and Social Services set up a three-year programme of volunteer-led community networks, which were sometimes called compassionate communities. These support lonely and isolated people through a social-prescribing model and help address the harmful effects of loneliness and isolation.

Work is ongoing with communities to protect local facilities that do bring people together, including libraries, leisure centres and museums. These are very important to older people and to people who are living on their own, going through periods of unemployment or isolation. Of course, they have to be able to access those facilities and, indeed, many of those have been threatened and reduced by austerity and we need to ensure that we can protect and safeguard them.

The concessionary bus pass is an important point. It’s become a social lifeline for older people in Wales with 92 per cent saying their bus pass maintains their independence and 81 per cent believing their quality of life would suffer without it. So, our bus services are key, as Joyce Watson has said. They do enable and empower people—not just older people but also disabled people and their carers. It was mentioned in the Red Cross report that mobility limitations result in vulnerability, leading to loneliness and isolation—without independent means to leave your home, befriending schemes, as well as travel and bus pass opportunities. They’re all part of the important links that enable people to be part of community life.

So, the British Red Cross scheme—of course, the Welsh Government funds the British Red Cross in partnership with the Royal Voluntary Service—to support the Positive Steps befriending project is clearly important. It’s key to this. Those two organisations are working together to create a new programme to support older people experiencing acute loneliness, isolation and ill-health. We’ve funded the commissioner for older people in Wales to act as our independent voice, to champion older people across Wales and to deliver the Ageing Well in Wales programme. This brings individuals and communities together with public, private and voluntary sectors to develop innovative and practical ways to make Wales a good place to grow old. The programme focuses on five themes, including loneliness and isolation, and it’s developed a campaign to end loneliness, in partnership with the Royal Voluntary Service, the British Red Cross and Men’s Sheds as well, which it’s important to mention.

We’ve also funded Mind Cymru’s My Generation, a forward-thinking project that aims to develop and deliver a new programme of support to improve the resilience and well-being of older people at risk: those people who are at risk of developing mental health problems as a result of isolation and discrimination, financial exclusion and poor housing. And one of the main aims of our ‘Together for Mental Health’ plan is to reduce the inequalities experienced by people with mental ill health. Discrimination can prevent people accessing the opportunities that many take for granted, and stigma can make people reluctant to seek support, reinforcing the isolation and distress mental illness can cause. We’ve all got a responsibility to engage people in need, to talk candidly and openly about the issues that, left unchecked, result in isolation and mental distress, but we do need to move beyond discussions. There’s no question that the issue has been raised very powerfully by the media, as well as by evidence from the organisations and campaigns involved, but it is incumbent on all of us to look to the role of Government as well as us as individuals and in our communities to address this.

So, I want to end my response to the short debate about loneliness and isolation by referring again, as Joyce Watson did at the start of her debate today, to the ‘Trapped in a Bubble’ study by the British Red Cross and the Co-op. Again, it’s worth repeating what the study has sought and is delivering. It’s investigated the triggers for loneliness in the UK, and identified four areas in Wales—again, I repeat: Carmarthenshire, Conwy, Newport and Torfaen—where people need extra support. We must all learn from that study in our constituencies and regions. Mark Isherwood has already identified and made contact in his region and, of course, in Torfaen, there’s an opportunity, as well as Newport, Conwy and Carmarthenshire; they’re all constituencies that I know Members wanted to follow up very closely.

As a result of the efforts of Co-op colleagues, members and customers, £50,000 was raised to enable the Red Cross to provide support to the people experiencing loneliness and isolation in those areas. Again, to see the continued generosity of people in communities in Wales in these financially challenging times is very heart-warming. But I think also that spirit of generosity makes it clear that the Government—Welsh Government, local government—must not only deliver but develop a national strategy that crosses all departmental portfolios to help us tackle loneliness and to bring together some of the strands of Government action already to make sure that they are looking at this from a strategic perspective and also being clear what our partners can deliver. And I think the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 actually provides that framework in terms of what actions can be taken, and I think the first key principle of focusing on prevention and early intervention is absolutely key in terms of tackling this issue of loneliness and isolation.

Very, very finally, I would like to thank Joyce Watson for mentioning the pioneering work of the late Jo Cox MP and the fact that it’s now being taken forward by both Labour and Conservative women MPs in Westminster, and we, I’m sure, will engage with that. As far as Jo Cox was concerned, combatting loneliness was very much at the forefront of her inspiring work as an MP: her ‘Hope not hate’ campaign. There’s more that unites us than divides us, and I think this is the policy and philosophy where people in Wales will expect us to unite for the common good accordingly.

Thank you very much, and that brings today’s proceedings to a close.

The meeting ended at 18:44.