Only the Beginning: How the UK Made an Impact on Loneliness and How it Can Do It Again

When the UK Prime Minister launched the world’s first ever government-level loneliness strategy in 2018, she said it was ‘only the beginning of delivering a long and far reaching social change in our country.’ That day, campaigners who had pushed the government to take action were thrilled – and excited about the prospect of helping to make its promise real. And yet, just a few short years later, the UK’s leadership on loneliness had stalled: by 2025, several key organizations driving impact had shuttered; national philanthropies that had sought to tackle loneliness for a decade had shifted their priorities; and a movement that had been in the ascendency fragmented as the world moved on to apparently more urgent issues.

This study examines the 15 year period between 2010 and 2025 in which the UK field working to reduce loneliness grew, had uncommonly rapid systemic and cultural impact, and then fell back before that impact could be embedded for a generation. The research was conducted through surveys and in-depth interviews with 15 of the key leaders in the field during that period – academics and philanthropists, campaigners and social entrepreneurs, policymakers and politicians. The findings reflect both the frustrations and the hopes for further action of those who still see loneliness as a personal crisis, a public health crisis, and a political crisis.

Research participants identified three key phases during this period: steps of progress between 2010 and 2020, accelerated in 2016 after the tragic murder of Jo Cox MP; a moment of meaningful impact and significant opportunity, both ultimately lost, during the COVID pandemic from 2020 to 2021; and the subsequent stalling of action from 2022 to 2025. The full story can be read in this 108-page report, but this overview summarizes the key findings.

PROGRESS (2010-2020): “What people call serendipity sometimes is just having your eyes open.”

According to the research, there were 10 key factors between 2010 and 2020 that contributed to the UK taking serious action at the local and national levels to reduce loneliness. Those were:

• The historical context: Over the 30 years leading up to the start of the study period, Britain became an increasingly individualistic society. By 2010, the proliferation of smartphones and the global financial crisis led to a new generation of social causes emerging, as people grappled with questions of connection and identity. In this context, people were both experiencing loneliness personally, and frequently encountering it through their professional roles.
  
• Policy conditions: Between 2010 and 2015, political messaging around ‘The Big Society’ and the volunteerism of the London Olympics inspired new top-down support for bottom-up social entrepreneurship and innovation. At the same time, the government’s austerity agenda created imperatives for community leaders to act on loneliness, including those who saw that social justice required a more equal spread of healthy, meaningful, and productive relationships.
  
• Academic first movers: A small number of academics, who also saw themselves as advocates, produced evidence about the insidious nature of loneliness amongst specific groups. The creation of The Campaign to End Loneliness sparked connections between researchers, government, philanthropists, and civil society that began to have a ripple effect.
  
• Philanthropic entrepreneurship: Led initially by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a small group of funders invested modest pots of money that had an outsized impact. Spirit of 2012, Nesta, The National Lottery Community Fund, and The Co-Op Foundation made grants to build loneliness infrastructure and seed grassroots action.
  
• Community leadership, impact, and storytelling: An initially small number of individuals and local and national organizations started to demonstrate meaningful results and tell emotive stories about how impact could be grown. Grassroots initiatives were generally not coordinated but had clear common traits: they developed authentic language and activities that reflected their communities; they focused on the power and joy of human connection; they often brought people from different backgrounds together; they were largely rooted in local places but lifted from their work to advocate for structural change; and they were unafraid to take risks.
  
• The life, leadership, and legacy of Jo Cox: Jo Cox’s political analysis of loneliness, and her creation of the Loneliness Commission, helped raise awareness in Westminster of the dangers of loneliness. After Cox was murdered in 2016, the determination of her friends and family to honor her life included new and urgent calls to make a once-in-a-generation impact on loneliness. All participants in this research recognized this as the transformational factor that led to the UK taking action on loneliness at the national level.
  
• Political leadership: The leadership of Theresa May as Prime Minister, Tracey Crouch as Minister for Loneliness, Rachel Reeves and Seema Kennedy as Co-Chairs of the Jo Cox Loneliness Commission, Cox’s sister Kim Leadbeater as a powerful advocate in the media and later as an MP, and then individual leadership at the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport were fundamental to the creation of the loneliness strategy in 2018. Indeed, a key theme emerged in this research about the power of women in leadership.
  
• Public understanding and empathy: From 2012, the media’s interest in loneliness as a societal trend and a political crisis grew. Significant features appeared in major global outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, and the BBC. These increased in frequency after 2016. The combination of all these layered factors started to have significant ‘cut through’ with the public, and it was observed that the stigma around loneliness reduced.
  
• Collaboration and momentum in a nascent field: Leaders in the loneliness sector spoke of a ‘snowballing’ and ‘momentum’ after 2016. This was attributed in part to the sense that loneliness was a ‘new’ issue, or at least a fresh lens on a group of issues that had long been prominent. This novelty helped engender a culture of collaboration, cross-party working, and, after the launch of the government’s loneliness strategy, a sense that the UK was a global leader on the issue. This in turn contributed to a sense of optimism about what could be achieved.
  
• A confluence of birds: Study participants spoke of an ‘alchemy’, a ‘convergence’, an ‘interplay’, and even a ‘sliding doors’ phenomenon – in other words, that diversely skilled people, motivated by a range of apparently unrelated factors and circumstances, ‘fell into’ work to reduce loneliness, and happened to be well suited to explore, learn, and take action together ‘without ego’.

COVID (2020-2021): “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”

Most study participants spoke about the pandemic as a unique moment of opportunity to raise awareness about the harmful effects of loneliness, and to embed once-and-for-all the systems change and culture change that had been seeded over the previous decade. The sector was deemed to be well-prepared for the crisis, and 71 percent of research participants identified 2017 to 2021 as the period when the UK’s infrastructure around loneliness was strongest. During the first wave of the pandemic, there was a sense that the loneliness field was not just chasing a zeitgeist, but leading it.

And yet this research also identified a unanimous view amongst leaders in the field that the pandemic eventually precipitated a sharp decline in funding, leadership, action, and coverage on loneliness, and that progress on the issue stalled after 2022. Indeed, there was an equally strong consensus that UK infrastructure around loneliness has been weakest from 2022 to the present day.

Subsequently, leaders shared widespread frustration at the irony that a pandemic which left everyone ‘self-isolating’ and ‘social distancing’ did not ultimately embed transformative action and national leadership on loneliness. For some, this was emblematic of a broader dysfunction in the UK’s civil society, political, policymaking, and philanthropic sectors.

STALLING (2022-2025): “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Just as a layering of factors led to the UK making an impact on loneliness between 2010 and 2020, so these factors were essentially inverted after the pandemic, in a way that challenged the sustainability and indeed perceived relevance of the field. According to this research, those inverted factors included:

• The historical context: Between 2020 and 2022, the UK economy was severely disrupted by the pandemic, the country’s departure from the European Union, and a cost of living crisis precipitated by global conflict and high inflation. Between 2022 and 2024 Britain had four unsteady Prime Ministers each with differing priorities, and riots returned to the streets. In this context of instability, loneliness was no longer a ‘national mission’ shared by politicians, philanthropies, or civil society.
• Policy conditions: While the new government elected in 2024 has a number of programs that overlap with the loneliness agenda, and some policies expressly mention the issue, there is no longer a bespoke loneliness strategy, and few of the leaders interviewed for this research are clear on whether there is still a Minister for Loneliness. Indeed, when asked what would make the biggest impact to reduce loneliness in the UK in the next decade, 60 percent of respondents selected ‘a renewed government strategy’.
• Challenges with evidence: While evidence is clear that loneliness is harmful for individuals, health systems, and democracies, questions about the most appropriate tools to measure it in community settings have never been resolved. Relatedly, there remains debate about whether ‘loneliness’ is the right lens through which to define an issue that overlaps with social capital, social cohesion, and social connection. These distinctions are seen as a barrier to funding for the sector. More fundamentally, evidence suggests that loneliness has not in fact reduced at the population level during this period, raising questions about the efficacy of the UK’s approach.
• Philanthropic withdrawal: There is a perception that key funders ‘moved away’ from work to reduce loneliness, right at a time when it was still desperately needed. It is felt that this was due to philanthropic reprioritization in response to the cost of living crisis – that, in Maslow’s hierarchy, physiological and security needs are more fundamental than relational needs. But there was also a sense that the loneliness field had relied on ‘crumbs’ even during its period of progress, and that investment in the issue during that period essentially followed a ‘fashion’ and was never structurally embedded, ultimately leading to the collapse of civil society work around the issue.
• An underdeveloped sector: The research revealed a view that what had been a perceived strength during the period of progress – that the sector was punching above its weight, or somehow more than the sum of its parts – quickly became a critical weakness in the changed context. Some civil society organizations were ‘running on fumes’, and had not been given space to mature on their own terms, making them vulnerable to transitions and shocks. As a result, key individuals and groups that helped drive impact before 2020 were no longer active by 2025.
• Diminished political leadership: It was perceived that few if any of the political leaders who helped drive progress on loneliness between 2016 and 2020 remained as influential on the issue by 2025. Meanwhile, the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport had disbanded and repurposed its loneliness team in 2020 to respond to the urgent crisis of the pandemic and lockdowns, and no subsequent Minister for Loneliness was as effective as Tracey Crouch.
• Public polarization and media prioritization: After the pandemic, the UK experienced ‘a crisis of trust, exhaustion and struggle, a rising threat perception, and a loss of agency.’ These factors were cited as contributing to a decline in participation in initiatives to tackle loneliness. Similarly, polarization and political and geopolitical crises dominated media narratives after 2021, leading to a sense of powerlessness that was the opposite of the social activation between 2010 and 2016. As one leader in the field put it, ‘there are more activists now than entrepreneurs.’
• Fragmentation and stalled momentum in a nascent field: Whereas individuals in the sector were generally seen as humble and collaborative in the period of progress, the sector is now seen as more fragmented, competitive, and ‘ego-driven’. With the closure of key organizations, there is no widely recognized central energy and less coherent public narrative storytelling to motivate collective action. Meanwhile, framing of the issues has generally broadened from the publicly salient ‘loneliness’ to the less emotive ‘social capital’, creating a ‘pettiness of small differences’ that needs to be resolved if further meaningful progress is to be made.
• Sliding doors: Just as there was a sense that progress on loneliness before 2020 was in part driven by a confluence of circumstances, so there is a sense that a convergence of factors led to stalling by 2025. While it is not surprising that disruptive forces arrived – indeed, they are on a continuum from the financial crisis in 2008 – the speed at which they came was clearly destabilizing. And yet leaders remaining in the sector do not generally wish to acquiesce to factors beyond their control, or to leave the fate of work on loneliness to equanimity.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPACT: “The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”

There is a clear sense amongst leaders who participated in this study that there is enough remaining strength in the loneliness ecosystem to consider the last few years a setback rather than a fatal blow. Indeed, there was a feeling of a new energy emerging around a necessity to act in the current polarized context – that a new generation of changemakers can see this as ‘our time, our moment.’ Those new opportunities for impact include:

• A new age of connection: As new questions arise about power in an age of polarization, populism, and tech oligarchy, leaders are hopeful that a counterculture of connection is possible – that the revolution in artificial intelligence will force fundamental questions about what makes us human and how we interact, and that loneliness can remain a rare non-partisan, almost binding issue. As one research participant put it: ‘investing in relationships remains uniquely powerful in bringing hope.’
• A government in search of a mission: For a government still looking for a philosophy, loneliness – and its antidote, community – can provide a powerful story. The UK is still viewed as a leader on loneliness around the world. It risks losing that crown, but it can build on past progress by scaling social prescribing, investing in third spaces and community innovations, making public services more focused on prevention, and catalyzing a spirit of togetherness.
• Harnessing a strength: While new investments in research were generally not supported by participants in this study, Office for National Statistics data gathered under the government’s 2018 loneliness strategy are deemed to be a unique asset. These data are perceived to be currently underused, but could provide insights to help target modest resources to drive impact.
• Back to the future: With loneliness no longer singularly prioritized in major national foundations, it falls to smaller and next generation philanthropies to lead change. There was a sense from study participants that active funders should invest over multiple years in infrastructure organizations to spotlight the good work still going on in local communities, and to reassert loneliness on the political and media agenda. Meanwhile, grassroots organizations can attract funding through programmatic innovations and telling stories that are relevant to current political conversations.
• Learning and leadership: There remains immense learning about what works from the last 15 years of action on loneliness, and inspiring work ongoing in local places. Participants in this research suggested that this learning can be better shared to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs and storytellers. This could be done through a ‘tsar’ or reappointed Minister for Loneliness, leadership programs to spread effective models for building connection to local places, and training to embed the importance of relationships across sectors.
• Political leadership: Alongside a renewed government loneliness strategy, the action identified in this research that would make the biggest impact on loneliness in the UK was ‘ambitious individual or party political leadership at the national level.’ Like the political leadership of the 2016-2018 period, this would need to transcend party lines. It would build on the UK’s reputation as a global leader on loneliness, while also pulling in learning from around the world – re-creating that virtuous cycle between academia, philanthropy, civil society, media, and governments.
• Public understanding and storytelling: 75 percent of leaders in this research identified ‘better storytelling by charities, government, leaders, and in the media’ as a key opportunity. But leaders stressed that stories should not focus on loneliness as a ‘medical or health issue’. Rather, they should be about how we exist and interact with other humans in times of accelerated change.
• A multifactorial approach: When it comes to opportunities to make an impact in the coming years, leaders see cross-sector, cross-disciplinary, cross-party, and indeed a multifactorial approach that recognizes the historical and broader social context as key. Collaboration with business was also called out as important, especially in the context of changing work patterns and practices.

The two big ideas that emerged from this research that cut across almost all these themes were: the creation of a new Center for Connection, and the launch of a Global Inquiry focusing on how we might live, work, play, and interact in a more technological future. Taken together, these initiatives could harness data, aggregate learning, improve storytelling, scale training, galvanize leadership, pull in global philanthropy, and test and promote new ideas to reduce loneliness.

What’s clear is that progress does not happen by accident. It is not circumstance or serendipity that drives change; it is trial and error, matched to collective bravery, collaboration, determination, and resilience. The story of how the UK drove action to reduce loneliness between 2010 and 2025 contains many lessons for actors still in the field. More than that, it provides a guide for how social changemakers working on various issues all over the world can nurture a more just, more democratic, more genuinely connected world.