Loneliness is still discussed in my sector as a mood, something a coffee morning can fix. It is not.

Every week I meet the reality behind that idea: a tenant who has not spoken to anyone in three days; a widower whose only real conversation is with the district nurse.

That is not a mood. It is a health condition with a postcode, a front door and a bill attached to it.

The evidence matches what we see. The Scottish Household Survey found a quarter of people aged 75 and over felt lonely in the previous week. Among single pensioners, it was 41 per cent.

Age Scotland estimates almost half of over-50s are lonely all or some of the time, and that there is at least one chronically lonely older person on every street.

Loneliness is linked to depression, heart disease, stroke and a substantially higher risk of dementia. A University of St Andrews study shows that reducing loneliness protects cognitive function. The World Health Organization treats it as a major risk factor, not a lifestyle footnote.

If that is the diagnosis, Scotland has to ask where treatment actually happens. Not in a GP surgery. Not on a ward.

A doctor can name loneliness. A hospital can treat the fall, the chest infection or the crisis that isolation helped to cause. Neither can supply the daily human contact that prevents the next admission.

That contact is either designed into housing, or left to chance: a neighbour, a daughter who lives far away, a friendship line that closes at five.

That is why I do not think of housing for older people as a property product. I think of it as a public-health setting.

A Hanover development is built around that fact. Homes have their own front doors. They also have a lounge, a laundry, a garden, a guest room, a community alarm and employees who notice when someone changes.

Tenants form groups, and our Forums bring more than a hundred people into decisions about their services. Our Happy Customer Strategy is explicit: reduce loneliness and support connection, not only raise a satisfaction score.

The clinic is the combination: a home you can use, people you will see, and employees who will notice if you don’t.

Loneliness will not be solved by another awareness week. It will be reduced where older people already live, when we design housing as if health depended on it.

Because it does.