Britain appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018. What happened next?
In January 2018, the UK did something that seemed strange to many at the time: it appointed a Minister for Loneliness.
Tracey Crouch became the world's first government minister with responsibility for loneliness – in addition to her portfolio for sport and civil society. Prime Minister Theresa May's decision was a response to a study showing that more than nine million Britons regularly felt lonely. The media reaction was moderately skeptical. It sounded like symbolic politics.
Six years later, the picture is more nuanced.
What the UK actually did
In October 2018, the British Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport developed a national strategy titled A connected society. It contained concrete measures: a standardized national method for measuring loneliness (based on a direct question and the UCLA Loneliness Scale), a cross-departmental ministerial committee comprising nine departments, the so-called Building Connections Fund with £11.5 million for local projects, and a public destigmatization campaign under the motto "Let's Talk Loneliness".
The funded projects included new transport services for people with limited mobility, digital connection offerings for older Britons, and a "Tech to Connect" innovation fund with one million pounds. Over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, an additional £24 million was invested directly in loneliness prevention.
Was this a solution? No. The UK DCMS's current annual reports are self-critical: loneliness remains widespread, the effects of many measures are hard to measure, and the challenge is bigger than a single ministerial portfolio. But the issue has been given an address. There is political accountability, a national dataset, cross-departmental coordination, and a public debate that did not exist before.
Japan and others
The UK did not remain alone. In February 2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and alarmed by sharply rising suicide rates, Japan appointed its first Minister for Loneliness: Tetsushi Sakamoto. The official title was "Minister in charge of measures for isolation-related problems and loneliness" – a title that reflects the seriousness of Japan's kodokushi phenomenon: lonely deaths whose bodies are often not discovered until weeks after death.
Australia and other European countries have since been discussing similar institutions. The question is no longer an academic one.
What Germany has done so far
Germany is more reticent in this regard. There is no Ministry for Loneliness, no loneliness commissioner at the federal level.
What does exist: the Kompetenznetz Einsamkeit (KNE – Competence Network on Loneliness), founded in 2022 on the initiative of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, intended to bring together research, practice, and policy. There are around 530 publicly funded multi-generational houses nationwide. There is Silbernetz in Berlin, a volunteer-run telephone companionship initiative. There is the program Wege aus der Einsamkeit (Paths out of Loneliness) run by the BMFSFJ, co-financed by the European Social Fund.
These initiatives are well-intentioned and partly effective. But they are predominantly local, volunteer-driven, hard to scale, and structurally unable to address the problem systematically. There is no national database, no overarching strategy, and no political body that treats loneliness as a health risk in its own right.
Loneliness researcher Susanne Bücker put it succinctly: a loneliness commissioner at the federal level would give the issue an "address and house number." Without that, it remains a marginal problem in an overcrowded political agenda.
What the comparison reveals
The comparison between the UK and Germany is not an accusation. It is a stocktaking.
Both countries have the same problem: a growing older population, shrinking informal networks, a care system that structurally does not cover social loneliness. The UK decided to treat loneliness as a political task. Germany treats it as a social challenge to be left to others.
The difference is not the quantity of available services. It is the question of whether the state classifies loneliness as a health risk requiring systematic prevention – or as a personal fate to be bridged as best one can.
The US Surgeon General classified loneliness as a public health crisis in 2023, comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Whether Germany will politically follow this verdict remains an open question.