Freedom of Information Our first policy report
Field Note 10
Eight Years of Loneliness Policy. It Got Worse.
Reporting & analysis by Sam Cope
LondonWe asked the government what eight years of loneliness policy had changed for young adults. On dating apps, targeted spending and whether its interventions reached them, DCMS gave the same answer: it did not hold the information.
Read what DCMS told usThe report in numbers
- England, 2018/19
- 8%
- England, 2025/26
- 9%
- Selected borough figure
- 13%
- Questions unanswered
- 3
Not really using them at the moment
There is a specific face people make when you ask them how the apps are going. Not embarrassment exactly — something quieter, more tired. A brief look away. Then: not really using them at the moment.
It has become one of the defining social admissions of London in your late twenties. Like saying you've stopped watching the news, or that you've had to take a break from Instagram. You know what it means even when the person doesn't say it outright. You tried. It didn't feel like trying anything. You stopped.
Eight years. One percentage point.
We submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in August. We wanted to know what the government actually knew about loneliness among people aged 16 to 34 — borough by borough, year by year, and whether anything had changed since the UK became the first country in the world to appoint a Minister for Loneliness in 2018. The response arrived today, alongside new data tables published on gov.uk this morning.
Here is what eight years of ministerial attention looks like: in 2018/19, 8% of 16 to 34 year olds reported feeling lonely often or always. In 2025/26, that figure is 9%. The government's own statisticians note that the difference falls within confidence intervals. They are calling it stable. The direction says something else.
We also asked three further questions: whether the government held data on the relationship between dating app usage and loneliness in under-34s; what it was specifically spending on loneliness interventions for that age group; and whether it had assessed whether its interventions were actually reaching young adults. The answer to all three was the same: we do not hold information in scope of your request.
Three questions. The same answer.
From the FOI response reported here
Our questions, summarised
-
Dating apps
Does DCMS hold data linking dating app use and loneliness in under-34s?
-
Targeted spending
What is being spent specifically on loneliness interventions for this age group?
-
Reaching young adults
Has DCMS assessed whether its interventions are reaching young adults?
“we do not hold information in scope of your request.”
This is a statement about information held within the scope of this request. It does not establish that no relevant research, spending or evaluation exists elsewhere.
Different boroughs. The same question.
The data arrived, for the first time, broken down by London borough. Barking and Dagenham: 13% of 16 to 34 year olds feeling lonely often or always. Kensington and Chelsea: also 13%. Lewisham: 12%. Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Waltham Forest: all above the London average of 8%. Nine percentage points separate the highest borough from the lowest. Isolation does not organise itself around deprivation in any straightforward way. It turns out to be more evenly distributed than that — more stubborn, more indifferent to postcode than the policy framing would suggest.
The Minister for Loneliness was a serious idea. A genuine attempt to name a problem most governments had been too embarrassed to acknowledge. But by the measure of the people it was most meant to help — young adults, in cities, in the years when you are supposed to be most socially connected — nothing has measurably improved. A decade of reports, strategies, social prescribing pilots, cross-departmental working groups. No data on what's driving it. No specific budget for the age group most affected. No assessment of whether any of it is working. Nine percent.
They gave it a real go. They left anyway.
The data has been catching up with the feeling for a couple of years. The major dating apps have been losing UK users steadily — hundreds of thousands gone across the big platforms, the decline accelerating rather than reversing. This is not people finding love and logging off. The apps know. They are just hoping something changes.
What's notable is not the decline itself but the shape of it. The users leaving are not the ones who were half-hearted to begin with — they're the ones who were serious. Who updated their profile, paid for a subscription, optimised their prompts on the advice of content they feel vaguely ashamed of having watched. They gave it a real go. And they left anyway.
The rooms people are learning to build
Walk around Hackney on a Friday evening. Look at who is in the wine bars and the gallery spaces and the low-lit rooms above the pubs. The 20-somethings and early 30-somethings who are conspicuously, effortfully out — not because they have somewhere specific to be, but because staying in feels like giving up on something they can't quite name. They are not on apps. They are not at mixers. They are in rooms, hoping that something in the structure of the evening will do the work that swiping stopped doing.
The data confirms what anyone who has asked a 28-year-old about their love life already suspects. The question now is what happens next — in the rooms people are slowly learning to build, in the formats that might actually work.
Reading the evidence: The national figures in this note refer to England. The reported change from 8% to 9% does not establish a statistically significant rise. A response that DCMS holds no information in scope of this request does not establish that no relevant research, spending or evaluation exists elsewhere. The account of why people leave dating apps is the author's interpretation, not a finding of the FOI response.
Explore the wider evidence on loneliness in London in the Human Connection Index, the research desk for The Dalloway Project.
Keep reading
Further reading
- Field Note 09 The city that forgot how to bump into people The built-city side of these numbers: the housing, pubs and routines that decide whether young Londoners ever get a second conversation.
- Field Note 05 Loneliness, London and the difference between proximity and connection Why London estimates run high in a city of nine million — and why proximity keeps failing to become connection.
Related records in the Human Connection Index
- A Connected Society: a strategy for tackling loneliness HM Government · 2018
- Community Life Survey 2024/25: loneliness and support networks Department for Culture, Media and Sport · 2025
- The Loneliest Generation — Youth Isolation in England Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) · 2026
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