Social benefit cheques alone will not solve social problems, the Dean of the Faculty of Social Wellbeing told Parliament on Wednesday.
Speaking to MPs during a meeting of the Social Affairs Committee, academic Andrew Azzopardi urged lawmakers to look beyond throwing money at social problems, but address the root causes.
“We need to stop thinking that cheques can cure people. They are important, we even need more [social benefits] in some cases, but alone they solve nothing,” he said.
Prof. Azzopardi later added that what could appear to be a solution addressing social problems, could in fact be masking over them and potentially making them worse.
The committee heard from the academic, along with his colleague Marilyn Clark, who went over the findings of a nationwide research project on loneliness.
Times of Malta first reported on the project’s findings last month.
The researchers told the committee members that two out of every five Maltese suffer from loneliness.
Nationwide survey
A total of 1,009 people aged 11 and up, from all regions across the islands, were surveyed for the study, which flags both emotional and social loneliness.
The National Statistics Office was commissioned to collect the data and the researchers used internationally-recognised tools so that the survey would provide data that is comparable with that of other countries.
The sample size, Prof. Clark told the MPs, was large enough to be able to extrapolate the findings and translate them into terms of the entire population.
For instance, a staggering 46,000 people in Malta do not feel positive about their life.
Some 186,000 Maltese, Prof Clark said, reported experiencing some for of loneliness.
She said the research team planned to continue studying this issue, in the years to come, with a view to inform social policy and laws. To undertake a research project like this just once, she said, would be almost useless.
The researchers will also be meeting other stakeholders to go through their findings.
The researchers undertook the project after discovering that almost no empirical data existed on the phenomenon.
Back in 2016, Times of Malta reported how a breakdown of the calls made to the 179 support line since 2006, showed how callers were 10 times more likely to call because they were lonely than for drug or alcohol abuse related problems.
Some 10,300 people called the number after feeling unbearably lonely, meaning one in every 10 of the 110,000 calls received by those operating the support telephone lines was from a lonely person.