The cost of remoteness: reflecting higher living costs in remote rural Scotland when measuring fuel poverty

Food budgets were based on calculations of how much more, in percentage terms, food costs in smaller, remote stores compared to supermarkets in remote rural Scotland. The 2021 report had found that supermarket prices in remote small towns were not significantly different from those in urban parts of the UK, and selective price comparisons in 2022 confirmed this. Uplifts were therefore based on further pricing of samples of the food baskets in more remote locations outside the main towns, compared to supermarkets. The percentage differences were applied to the 2022 UK food baskets, using weightings calculated in 2021. For the mainland calculations, these weightings were based on the percentage of the population living outside the towns, and on the proportion of a food budget that they would be expected to spend at local village stores to top up their main shop at town supermarkets. For island budgets, in addition, the proportion of the population who could not access a supermarket were assumed to buy all their food at local stores, and this cost in turn was incorporated using population weightings. In 2022, the uplift resulting from these calculations was higher than in 2021 as a result of higher percentage price differences in certain types of store. For example, on islands, food prices at a community store on a remote island were estimated to be 49% higher than in a supermarket in 2022, up from 27% in 2021.

Household consumables and personal goods such as hygiene products were assumed to be bought in supermarkets in most cases, and therefore did not involve any difference in price. However, in the case of people living in remote island locations, where such products needed to be bought at community stores, the same method was used as in the case of food, applying a percentage additional cost, weighted by the proportion of the island population living in such areas.

Clothing and most household goods are in some cases assumed to be bought in large towns or cities at the same price as in urban MIS, and in other cases – mainly on islands – costed separately, because local groups said it would not be practical to travel to buy them. In the latter cases, items in the 2022 budgets were re-costed at local stores on the same basis as in 2021. A small number of additional items identified as being required in these categories were also re-costed.

Most leisure, communications and transport items were costed separately in remote Scotland, following the specifications produced in the 2021 research. As referred to above, this could produce some important variations, for example because of constraints on the availability of second hand cars bought locally, and fluctuations in their prices.

As referred to above, important changes in the social participation budgets for the UK, when rebased in 2022, made comparisons with remote Scotland difficult, since the specifications for the latter were assumed to have remained the same. For working-age adults without children, this caused the repeat costing for remote Scotland leisure budgets to come out lower than for urban UK, even though there is no reason to think that social participation has become cheaper in remote areas than in urban areas (and indeed leisure costs for islanders had increased significantly). Therefore, where this occurred, the remote Scotland social participation budgets were assumed to be the same as for urban UK. The following were the social participation results for couples (from which singles’ budgets have also been calculated):

As shown in Table A2a and Table A2b, in 2021, working-age budgets for social participation were only slightly higher in remote rural areas than in the rest of the UK, but for pensioners they were substantially higher, particularly in the islands, due largely to the greater cost of going on holiday. In 2022, the remote rural costs had not changed much when re-costed. For working-age, the UK ones had overtaken them, but as previously stated, this could well be a result of the different ways they have been updated, so no difference between UK and remote Scotland is reported. For pensioners, on the other hand, the UK budgets did not rise, and the re-costed budgets for the Scottish islands remain higher.