Befriending older people
Befriending services for older people are one to one schemes that match a volunteer with an older person who is lonely or isolated, for a weekly visit or a weekly telephone call, and they are normally free to the person receiving them.
A family member wondering whether a weekly visit or call would help someone, a person considering asking for one themselves, and the coordinator running the service.
The line between befriending and care. A befriender is company, not a care worker, and when that line moves the person loses both the friendship and the care they actually needed.
A volunteer absorbs tasks nobody assessed, so an older person’s growing care needs never reach adult social care, and the scheme finds out only when the volunteer stops managing them. Nobody decided any of it.
Age UK and other national charities run befriending services, alongside local charities, community groups, faith organisations and services still operating under the older Age Concern name. Age UK itself was formed in 2009 by the merger of Age Concern England with Help the Aged, but a local Age Concern was always a separate, independently registered charity rather than a branch caught up in that merger, which is why some still use the name today. This site does not list or rate local services, and naming a national charity here states a fact about who runs these schemes, not a recommendation.
Is befriending free, and what “free” actually means
Free to the person is the norm. Befriending is volunteer delivered and funded by charitable fundraising, local authority grants or health commissioning, so there is usually no charge, no means test and no referral fee. Where a service does charge, what is being sold is generally something else: a paid companionship service, a home help, or a sitting service, all useful and none of them befriending.
Free to the person is not free to run. An active befriending match costs a scheme roughly £700 to £2,500 a year, with light touch telephone befriending at the bottom of that band, around £700 to £1,200, and the width comes from how complex the referrals are, whether the coordinator is full time, and whether volunteers travel to visits. What limits an older people’s service is almost never the supply of willing visitors: it is coordinator capacity, commonly 30 to 50 active matches, fewer where referrals are complex, which is why a befriending waiting list is an arithmetic problem rather than a recruitment one.
Who is referred, and how the referral arrives
Referrals arrive by four routes: the person telephones or completes a form themselves, a family member asks on their behalf, adult social care or a hospital discharge team refers, or a GP practice refers through a social prescribing link worker. Self referral is more common here than in any other setting on this site, which changes the coordinator’s job: nobody else has assessed this person, so the scheme’s own home visit is the only assessment there will be.
The reasons are consistent. Bereavement, particularly in the first two years. Losing the ability to drive, which in a rural area removes contact rather than convenience. Sight or hearing loss making the telephone and the front door harder. Caring for a partner with dementia, which is regularly missed because the carer is technically not alone. Discharge from hospital into a house that is suddenly too quiet.
Loneliness and isolation are different and this site does not treat them as one. Isolation is how many contacts a person has. Loneliness is how they feel about the contact they have. Around 6% of adults in Great Britain report feeling lonely often or always, according to the Office for National Statistics.
What a weekly visit or call actually changes
A weekly visit changes loneliness more reliably than it changes anything else. The evidence on befriending shows modest benefit on loneliness measures, and it is weaker and less consistent on depression and on use of health services. A scheme can reduce how lonely a person feels without changing how many people they see, and those are two different results often reported as one. A coordinator who promises a funder a reduction in health service use is promising the thinnest part of the evidence.
The mechanism is unglamorous. A fixed weekly hour puts one certain thing in the week: a reason to be dressed, a reason to have something to say, and one other person who would notice if the curtains stayed shut. Telephone befriending does most of the same work. Calls run 20 to 45 minutes weekly, and they suit people who cannot easily receive visitors, who live rurally, or who find a stranger in the house harder than a stranger on the phone.
Befriending and a care visit are not the same thing
A care visit and a befriending visit differ in every respect except that both involve somebody arriving at the door. A care visit is commissioned, task based and time limited, delivered by a paid worker through a regulated service: the Care Quality Commission regulates in England, the Care Inspectorate in Scotland, Care Inspectorate Wales, and the RQIA in Northern Ireland. A befriending visit is a relationship with no task list, delivered by a volunteer, and is not a regulated care service.
| Question | Befriending visit | Care visit |
|---|---|---|
| What happens | Company and conversation | Named tasks: washing, dressing, medication, meals |
| Who comes | A checked, trained volunteer | A paid care worker |
| How long | About an hour, weekly or fortnightly | A commissioned time slot |
| Who assesses need | The scheme, for suitability | The local authority, or a self funder’s own arrangement |
| Regulated as care | No | Yes, by the regulator for that nation |
| Cost to the person | Normally free | Charged privately, or charged or funded following a needs and financial assessment |
A befriender therefore does not do personal care, does not handle or prompt medication, does not lift or move anybody, and does not manage money, bank cards or shopping funds. Those are not squeamish rules. They keep an unassessed care need visible, and they protect a volunteer who has no training, no supervision and no insurance for any of it. Adult safeguarding duties sit with the local authority under the Care Act 2014 in England, the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 in Wales, and the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007 in Scotland. Northern Ireland is different again: there is no single adult safeguarding statute in force there, and operational responsibility sits with the Health and Social Care Trusts, working to the Department of Health’s adult safeguarding policy rather than to a council social care function.
The befriender notices the person cannot manage at home any more
The befriender does not fill the gap and does not wait until next week. They tell the coordinator the same day, describing what they saw rather than what they concluded. The coordinator raises it with adult social care or the referrer, tells the person what is being done and why, and keeps the befriending going, because withdrawing the company at the moment the care conversation starts is the worst possible sequence.
Volunteering as a befriender for older people
To volunteer as a befriender, apply to a scheme and expect 6 to 12 weeks from application to first meeting, nearly all of it references, checks and training. The scheme will interview you about motivation as well as availability, and will put you through the criminal record check for your nation: a DBS check in England and Wales, PVG scheme membership in Scotland, an AccessNI check in Northern Ireland. Checks are free of charge for volunteers who meet the DBS definition of a volunteer, though an umbrella body may charge its own admin fee, and current fee positions are published by those bodies.
The befriender
- Comes on the agreed day, and telephones when they cannot, because a missed visit is felt far more than the visit is
- Keeps to company and conversation, and declines care tasks and money on the spot
- Reports a concern about safety, capacity or finances the same day
- Ends the match through the scheme, with notice and a last visit, never by going quiet
The person visited
- Chooses whether to have a befriender at all, and can end it without giving a reason
- Can ask for a different volunteer, or for calls instead of visits, at any point
- Is told what the befriender will and will not do before the first visit
- Can ask what the scheme records, who sees it, and how long it is kept
The scheme checks, trains, insures and supervises, visits the home before the volunteer does, and holds the escalation route to adult social care. It keeps volunteer files and match records for a period it has written down, commonly 6 years, because UK GDPR sets no fixed retention period and requires the scheme to decide one and apply it.