What befriending is
Befriending is a deliberate, supported one-to-one relationship whose purpose is the relationship itself, reviewed as it goes and brought to a planned ending. A befriender visits or telephones someone who has become isolated, and the visit or the call is the whole of the intervention.
Someone thinking of becoming a befriender, a family arranging support for a relative who has stopped seeing people, and the coordinator writing a befriending service into a funding bid.
The idea that a relationship can be the intervention. Once a funder makes befriending report on outcomes it was never designed to produce, the visits start being used for something else.
Befriending gets quietly reclassified as a welfare check, the volunteer is given a form to complete each visit, and the one thing the person valued, that somebody came who did not want anything, is gone.
There is no goal beyond it and nothing to complete. That is the design, and it is precisely what makes befriending easy to describe, hard to commission and simple to do badly.
What befriending someone actually means
Befriending someone means agreeing to be reliably present in their week for an agreed period, through an organisation that has checked and trained you. The typical face-to-face commitment is an hour a week or an hour a fortnight. Telephone befriending is a call of 20 to 45 minutes, usually weekly and at a time the person chooses. Matches commonly run 6 to 12 months, and with older people are often left open-ended.
People are referred to befriending after something has removed the ordinary traffic from their life: a bereavement, a stroke, discharge from hospital, the end of a long period of caring, or arrival in a new country. The referral often comes from a GP practice, a social prescribing link worker, an adult social care team, a hospital discharge team or the person’s own family.
What befriending is not
Befriending is confused with three neighbouring things, and each confusion causes a different kind of harm.
| Not this | Because | The harm when they are mixed up |
|---|---|---|
| Visiting or a welfare check | A check has a task and a form. Befriending has neither, and the absence is the active ingredient. | The person becomes a case being monitored rather than someone being visited. |
| Care | Personal care, medication and moving and handling are regulated activities carried out by trained, insured, accountable workers. | An untrained volunteer takes on a task that injures somebody, and the scheme finds it is not covered. |
| Friendship | Friendship is mutual, unmanaged and permanent by default. Befriending is arranged, supervised and has an end. | Boundaries dissolve, the volunteer becomes the person’s only support, and the ending lands as abandonment. |
The difference between befriending and friendship is that a third party is responsible for it. Somebody knows the match exists, knows when the last contact was, and would notice if it stopped.
Who runs befriending services, and what they cost
Befriending services in the United Kingdom are run by national charities, by hundreds of small independent local organisations, by some housing associations and hospices, and by a growing number of services commissioned through the NHS and local authorities alongside social prescribing. Age UK is the best known name in befriending for older people and runs services locally as well as nationally, and it is one provider among many rather than the whole sector. This site does not list, rate or recommend individual services, including that one.
Befriending is normally free of charge to the person receiving it, because it is funded by the organisation running it rather than charged for at the door. If a service does charge, or if befriending is bundled into a paid package of support, that should be stated in writing before the first visit. From the scheme’s side the cost is real: light-touch telephone befriending sits at the bottom of the working range for a supported match, roughly £700 to £1,200 per match per year, and between 60% and 80% of that is coordination rather than the volunteering. Where a service falls in that range depends on how complex its referrals are, whether the coordinator is full-time and whether volunteers travel.
How someone becomes a befriender
Becoming a befriender takes 6 to 12 weeks from application to first contact. The route is broadly the same wherever you apply: an application form, an informal interview, two references, a criminal record check appropriate to your nation, induction training covering boundaries, safeguarding, confidentiality and lone working, then a considered match. In England and Wales the check is a Disclosure and Barring Service check at the level the role warrants; in Scotland a role with protected adults means Protecting Vulnerable Groups scheme membership through Disclosure Scotland; in Northern Ireland it is AccessNI. Checks are free for volunteers who meet the Disclosure and Barring Service definition of a volunteer, though an umbrella body may charge its own administration fee.
The befriender arrives and something has changed at home
Unopened post, no food, new bruising, a stranger in the house, confusion that was not there last week. The befriender does not investigate or decide whether it is serious. They keep the person safe in the moment, leave as normal, and telephone the coordinator the same day. The coordinator records what was seen in factual terms and follows the organisation’s adult safeguarding route, which runs to the local authority in England, Wales and Scotland, and to the Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland, where councils have no social care function. The coordinator then tells the befriender what happened next.
Why a relationship is hard to commission
Befriending is hard to commission because its purpose is not a measurable outcome, and funders buy measurable outcomes. The honest evidence position is narrow and worth stating plainly: befriending shows modest benefit on loneliness measures, and weaker, less consistent results on depression and on use of health services. It also matters that loneliness and isolation are different things. A scheme can reduce loneliness, which is how a person feels, without reducing isolation, which is how many contacts they have, and reporting one as though it were the other is the commonest error in this field. For context, around 6% of adults in Great Britain report feeling lonely often or always, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The befriender
- Comes when they said they would, or gives notice, because reliability is the whole offer.
- Keeps to the boundaries agreed at induction: no money, no medication, no lifts unless the scheme has authorised it.
- Tells the coordinator about changes at home, and about anything that made them uncomfortable.
The person visited
- Is told what the befriender will and will not do, before the first visit.
- Chooses the day, the time and whether the contact is a visit or a call.
- Can stop the match without having to justify it, and without losing the service.
The scheme carries the relationship’s ending as well as its beginning. It sets a review point even on open-ended matches, keeps contact records for a period it has written down and can justify under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and never lets a match run for years with nobody looking at it.