“A person is in fuel poverty if they spend more than 10% of their household income on fuel to
Identifying where fuel poor households are located is crucial to the effective targeting of fuel
Firstly, the data used in this study investigated using spatial autocorrelation and bivariate correlation
The spatial autocorrelation techniques were performed in GeoDa and the bivariate correlation
From these methods, it was found that fuel poverty in Scotland has increased from 2002 to 2012. It
Overall, fuel poverty is an important societal issue, largely affecting those already in income poverty.
References
Edinburgh City Council (2012) Housing and Fuel Poverty, [online]. Available at:
Government of Scotland (2002) Housing (Scotland) Act 2001, section 88, [online]. Available at:
Scottish House Condition Survey (2012) Fuel Poverty Evidence Review, [online]. Available at: Detecting fuel poverty in Scotland
Liann Rafter
adequately heat their home” (Government of Scotland, 2002). Fuel poverty can have wide ranging
social affects from mental illnesses to excessive winter deaths and so the Scottish government are
committed to eradicating it as far as reasonably possible by November 2016 (Edinburgh City Council,
2012).
poverty interventions and so dissertation aims to detect the trends of fuel poverty in Scotland
between 2002 and 2012. Furthermore, as fuel poverty is caused by high energy prices, low incomes,
and low energy efficiency, it is also an aim of this project to detect the trends in energy prices during
the same time period.
techniques. This provided a deeper understanding to the data. Secondly, areas of fuel poverty in
Scotland were detected using a multi-criteria analysis. In order to identify trends in Scotland, levels
of fuel poverty and fuel prices in 2002 were compared to the levels of fuel poverty and fuel prices in
2012.
techniques were performed in IBM SPSS Statistics v19. The multi-criteria analysis was performed in
ArcGIS v10.1 and MS Excel was also used in the early stages of the study for data preparation and
aggregation.
was also found that fuel prices increased during the same time period. Therefore, this shows the
impact that fuel prices have on fuel poverty. Low incomes also have a high impact on fuel poverty
whereas; the energy efficiency of a house has less of an impact. Moreover, if a household must pay
high fuel prices with a low income, a highly energy efficient house will not be enough to prevent
them falling into fuel poverty (Scottish House Condition Survey, 2012).
Therefore, areas of fuel poverty must be identified in order to tackle this increasing problem.
http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/file/4799/energy_efficiency_and_fuel_poverty_topic_paper
(accessed 1 July 2014).
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2001/10/pdfs/asp_20010010_en.pdf (accessed 1 July 2014).
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0039/00398798.pdf (accessed 1 July 2014).