Meeting of the Parliament 06 January 2016
I thank the committee very much for its inquiry and all the clerks and members for their work. I will start by picking up a strand that the minister threaded through his speech about Scotland being different as regards social isolation. I perhaps misinterpreted what he said, but I am sure that social isolation in our communities, and certainly in my community, is not specific to Scotland. We may want to take a much more innovative approach here with the powers in this Parliament, but I am sure that such isolation is not particularly experienced in this country alone. However, it is, indeed, a sign of our society.
In the lead-up to and over the Christmas period, I was taken by, first of all, John Lewis’s television advert, which pulled at people’s heartstrings and got to the point of social isolation and loneliness. However, it was Age UK’s campaign on the back of that advert that most struck me. The campaign appeared on my Facebook newsfeed. I noticed that friends of mine and people across my community in Dundee were signing up to go and visit elderly people in their houses. I then began to wonder about the societal bonds that have meant that it takes such a campaign to instigate such action by people. It took me back to years ago, to when I was a young child and my father took me to visit some of the elderly parishioners in our church and how delighted—I think—they were to get a visit from a young family in the parish. That led me to think about the bonds of inclusion. Those are very much alive in our churches, our trade union movement and our political parties. Such organisations bind together people of all ages and form networks and events for people to attend. I was glad to see that the campaign was so successful and that it had used social media to foster those bonds again and to get people returning to a routine of visiting and going into peoples’ homes.
I am very much looking forward to the short election campaign in April. Every member across the chamber, I think, will recognise as I do that one of the great privileges of campaigning is, as a candidate, going to someone’s door, especially that of an elderly person, and being invited in, and seeing that they are glad of that five or 10-minute visit.
That gets to the nub of the debate, which is about how we achieve the infrastructure in our communities that allows people to feel free and willing to do such things. The Facebook campaign showed that a lot of people want to do such things; we need to provide the infrastructure, which I think—if he does not mind my saying so—is what the minister meant when he talked about taking an innovative Scottish approach.
One of the things that jumped out at me from the Age Scotland briefing is the sentence that says:
“Though the State is not primarily responsible for the quality of people’s personal relationships, it does often have to deal with the consequences where these break down or are absent.”
That is where the budget implications and the human cost come from. As I said, the state is not primarily responsible for relationships, and I do not think that people want it to be primarily responsible for them, but it needs to support the infrastructure that allows people to have stronger bonds in their communities.
When I prepared for the debate, a figure jumped out at me from the Office for National Statistics and a longitudinal study of ageing that says that 34 per cent of those aged 52 or over say that they feel some loneliness. Among those aged 80 or over, that figure rises to 46 per cent. Nearly half of our citizens who are over 80 say that they feel often or always lonely and cut off from society.