Energy-related economic stress in the UK, at the interface between transport, housing and fuel poverty

At present, home energy issues are framed in terms of reducing energy consumption and emissions while at the same time taking into account fuel poverty - an established area of interest for British policy and research. The same is not true for transport poverty and economic stress, which are currently under researched. This is despite transport costs being an increasingly significant item of household expenditure, and a major cause of public concern in the UK - notably for low income car-owning households, who spend 31% of their income on transport.
The project will develop the concept of transport poverty, exploring its relationships with housing and fuel poverty, and implications for energy demand reduction and social justice. It will develop connections between the British academic and policy debate and similar debates abroad, where issues of increasing transport costs and vulnerability to oil price spikes have been framed in terms of sustainable spatial development, highlighting the interlinkages between transport and housing affordability.
The following research questions will guide the study:
1. What are the systematic patterns of transport poverty and economic stress in the UK, in terms of socio-demographics, geographic distribution and relationships with housing and fuel poverty?
2. What do these patterns suggest for the distributional and total demand implications of energy demand reduction policies and scenarios for the UK?
The project has been designed to have a symbiotic relationship with other on-going work on qualitative understandings of transport needs and affordability within the DEMAND Centre (www.demand.ac.uk). It will inform DEMAND's work with hard figures on transport poverty and economic stress, while at the same time using their qualitative findings to inform a critical discussion of existing data sets and to orientate the quantitative analysis.
A set of 5 interdependent workpackages, mostly consisting of secondary quantitative analysis, will span 18 months. The specific goals are:
1. to conceptualise the relationships between transport, housing and fuel poverty in an interdisciplinary and international perspective, based on an international literature review
2. to explore patterns of transport spending and its relationship with spending on housing and domestic energy in the UK, by analysing recent family expenditure data (Living Costs and Food Survey 2012)
3. to explore material deprivation and economic stress in low-income car owning households in the UK and the EU, based on the EU-SILC dataset
4. to explore more geographically detailed patterns of transport poverty for a metropolitan area characterised by high levels of deprivation, by analysing the Merseyside Travel Poverty Survey
5. to exploit MOT Tests and Results Data to understand the potential role of technological lags for lower income groups in aggravating transport poverty and economic stress, and to produce UK-wide maps of the fuel-related economic stress and oil vulnerability of car users
The project aims to challenge the current "silo" approach of policy making, in which issues of transport, housing and fuel poverty are seen as separate. A series of written outputs (publicly available working paper and report, policy briefing) and public engagement events (2-day international interdisciplinary workshop and final dissemination event) will aim to highlight the significance of transport poverty and to bring together a cross-sectoral audience of stakeholders, with potential impacts in terms of cross-fertilization and knowledge sharing. The ambition is to contribute to the development of innovative cross-sectoral policies, along the lines of measures experimented abroad (e.g. location efficient mortgages, mobility-efficiency certificates for building, online tools for calculating the mobility costs of residential relocation).

The project will add new understandings of cross sectoral, energy-related economic stress. By highlighting the distributional implications of energy demand reduction policies, which limit their public acceptability, it is of relevance to evidence-based policy making at a range of levels and departments, not least to DfT and DECC. By considering the interaction of transport and fuel poverty with housing affordability, it will also generate findings of interest to DCLG.
At the level of local authorities, the knowledge produced will benefit Integrated Transport Authorities and Passenger Transport Executives. The project will identify areas where economic stress is intensive, potentially informing the planning of subsidised public transport services. Therefore, efforts will be made to engage with the Passenger Transport Executive Group, Merseytravel and Transport for London (already a partner in DEMAND). The project will capitalise on other work in DEMAND on prices and justice, which is focussed on the engagement of stakeholders and transport policy makers at the local and national level, to enhance its economic and societal impact. The project will also add to the tools that the MOT project is developing for local authorities to evaluate policy interventions, by enriching the datasets with indicators of economic stress that allow a longitudinal 'tracking' of the distributional impacts of policies.
By adopting an international perspective, the project aims to arouse interest of policy makers for measures adopted abroad to reduce the transport expenditure of households. These include e.g. Location Efficient Mortgages (US) and online tools for calculating the mobility costs of residential relocation (Germany, Austria). While it is not always possible to import policies, this might contribute to the development of effective measures in the UK. This maps onto DEMAND'S priority of exploring the international experience of the governance of energy demand reduction. The analysis of an EU-level dataset on living conditions will allow comparison of the UK with other countries, generating findings of interest to policy communities in the EU.
Beyond policy-making, the project will benefit to a range of non-governmental organisations with interests in sustainable development and/or poverty and affordability, in the transport sector and beyond (e.g. Sustrans, Campaign for Better Transport, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, RAC Foundation). By showing which social groups and neighbourhoods struggle the most with the costs of motoring, the project will be of interest to public transport operators looking to expand their services.
The embedding of the project within DEMAND will ensure close cooperation with EDF R&D, which has an established interest in fuel poverty and will increase the project's non academic impact. Also, the project will benefit from DEMAND's stakeholder mapping exercise, which has set the goal to interact with over 150 stakeholders from the fields of energy, local planning and more.
By exploring the links between low fuel vehicle efficiency and transport poverty among low income households, the project will be of relevance to organisations such as the the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, informing their scenarios with social justice considerations.
Finally, engaging with the research communities working on housing affordability and fuel poverty will result in increased awareness of issues of transport poverty and economic stress, with cascading effects on the public awareness and understanding of this burning social issue, as well as on the design of future data collection exercises.
Overall, in the longer term, an improved understanding of economic stress in the transport sector will benefit wider society (including, crucially, future generations) in terms of increased resilience to oil price shocks, which is essential if the UK is to maintain economic competitiveness, social welfare and cohesion.