Welcome to this week's Squiggly Career podcast. I am Helen Tupper and this week I am not here with my other normal business partner and co-host Sarah. I'm actually here with Tracy Crouch MP. Thank you very much for joining us.

You're welcome. And I reached out to Tracy in response to a podcast that we did a while ago and also some insight that last year,

one of our most popular podcasts is actually on stress at work. And when we dug into that a little bit

as well, we got onto the topic of loneliness. And I think we were really struck by some

statistics around loneliness, particularly in the context of the workplace. And there was some

research that was done by total And there was some research that

was done by total jobs and some also research that was done by Relate that said that over half

of people at work, so 60, I think 62% of people at work identify as feeling lonely at work. And over

40% of people say they haven't got a single friend in the workplace and it just feels like something that we

keep coming up against our mission at amazing if is to make work better for everyone and when we look

at how we do that we keep coming up against people feeling lonely at work and when we were

researching it we also kept coming across you all known Tracy, and the role of being the UK's first

minister for loneliness. And we were, we already kind of done the podcast on loneliness, but it's

been such an important thing for us and seeing your role that it just felt like a great

opportunity to talk to you about what you spent last year doing in that role, what you found

out about it, anything that we can

take from all the insight and the research back to our community to help tackle this problem

a little bit in a practical way. So how did it come about about the kind of being the UK's,

and I think the world's first minister for loneliness? It was. It was the world's first

loneliness minister, although there is a happiness minister in the UAE, which I always thought I'd prefer that title,

but I'm pretty sure the British media wouldn't have tolerated that. But the role came about

in truth from the murder of Joe Cox. Joe had been talking about loneliness when she first entered Parliament.

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