The cost of remoteness: Reflecting higher living costs in remote rural Scotland when measuring fuel poverty - 2024 update

2 Methodology

Background

Following the passage of the Fuel Poverty (Targets, Definition and Strategy) (Scotland) Act 2019, the Scottish Government commissioned CRSP to:

• Carry out research in remote rural Scotland that consulted groups of citizens living in different areas about what is needed for a minimum, socially acceptable living standard in their communities, and how this varies from the research in urban UK.
• Use this research to establish a baseline of budgets for broad household types in remote mainland Scotland and in the islands, using these to calculate a percentage ‘uplift’ to be applied to the MIS benchmarks in the Scottish fuel poverty calculation.
• Update these calculations annually, based on price increases and (where appropriate) the changing composition of MIS budgets.

The initial intention was to uprate MIS budgets for remote rural Scotland based on CPI price indexation in odd-numbered years, and to carry out repricing of items and further analysis each time urban UK MIS budgets were rebased and reviewed, in even numbered years. A full ‘rebase’ of the remote Scotland research, involving groups of people living in these locations, is planned every eight years.

Disruptions arising from Covid-19 resulted in the first figures being published in 2021, relating to this year, rather than in 2020. The update in 2022 incorporated price changes, the re-pricing of items in remote rural locations in Scotland, and also took account of new urban UK MIS research undertaken in 2022 (Davis et al, 2022). In 2023, minimum budgets for remote rural Scotland were updated based on changes in prices between April 2022 and April 2023, as captured through the changes in components of CPI. The Appendix provides detail on the CPI categories used in updating MIS budgets in urban UK and in remote rural Scotland.

In 2024, urban UK MIS budgets for all household types were ‘rebased’, with groups of members of the public, starting from ‘blank sheets’ and tasked with discussing, agreeing and describing what households need for a minimum socially acceptable standard of living in 2024. This latest update of minimum budgets for remote rural Scotland to 2024 therefore takes as its starting point these updated baskets of goods and services for the different households covered here. The next section sets out how minimum budgets for remote rural Scotland were calculated in 2024, outlining the main changes in UK MIS for urban areas, and how these have been built into this latest update. It also re-visits the key areas of difference between remote rural Scotland and urban UK in terms of what is needed for a minimum socially acceptable standard of living.