Our social disconnection crisis – the evidence
While The Cares Family is no longer operational, our society continues to experience a crisis of social disconnection. This can be seen in rising:
- Isolation and loneliness – we are more separate from our communities and one another.
- Dislocation – we feel less of a sense of belonging in the changing places and communities around us.
- Division – we are less united in shared experience and empathy with others from different walks of life.
Each of these trends have been evidenced by academic and think tank research. You can read more about them in The Cares Family's report: Building Our Social Infrastructure: Why Levelling Up Means Creating A More Socially Connected Britain.
Isolation and loneliness
Numerous studies indicate that loneliness is increasing in the UK.
- In April 2022, 36% of people in the UK reported feeling lonelier 'now' than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic.
- In June 2022, 1 in 8 (12.7%) said they feel lonely often or always, compared to 11.5% in June 2019.
- 10% of people over the age of 65 experience chronic loneliness. While this has been true for the last 70 years, the number of people who fall into that age group continues to rise, so this problem is getting worse over time.
- 40% of 16 to 24-year-olds report feeling lonely often or very often – making them among the loneliest age groups in our society.
- Around one in five 18–34-year-olds now say that they only have one or fewer close friends – three times the level who said the same in 2011/12.
Loneliness has been shown to lead to strokes, heart attacks, obesity, mental health challenges like depression and anxiety, and some evidence suggests our disconnection from one another may even lead to cancer. If you have a heart attack, there are two lifestyle factors that drastically increase your chance of survival over any other: 1) not smoking; and 2) having good relationships that mean something to you.
Learn more about who is impacted by our loneliness epidemic here.
Division
Research also suggests that our communities are becoming less socially integrated.
- Half of UK adults say they only have friends who belong to their own ethnic group (statistic drawn from Jon Yates 2021 book Fractured: Why Our Societies Are Coming Apart And How We Put Them Back Together Again).
- Approximately half of people with university degrees have zero friends without degrees (statistic drawn from Fractured).
- In every decade between 1970 and 2000, those with higher incomes and education levels have moved further and further away from those with lower incomes and education levels.
- People under 18 only have a 5% chance of living in the same area as someone aged over 65, whereas they had a 15% chance of this in 1991.
- The geographic separation of young adults and retirees doubled between 1991 and 2016.
Dislocation
Evidence shows that levels of belonging are falling too.
- Between 1998 and 2017, people of all age groups became considerably less likely to say they feel they belong within their neighbourhood:
- The share of people over 65 who said this fell from 84% to 78%.
- Levels of local belonging among 18-24-year-olds fell from 51% to 45%.
Democracy
So, as well as being bad for individuals and communities, disconnection is bad for all of us. Increasingly, it is being recognised as a factor in democracy backsliding too. For example, evidence shows:
- Digital addiction, loneliness, and social polarisation are driving young people towards authoritarianism.
- While young people today are the most socially conscious generation in history, they are amongst the least socially engaged in terms of being active within their communities.
From 2011 to 2023, The Cares Family sought to address these issues and reverse these trends. You can read about the impact our work had in London, Liverpool, Manchester and beyond here.