ACT Blog: Rising petrol prices cost rural people £800 more than urban counterparts
Words by CEO Lorrainne Smyth
27th June 2022
As oil prices rise, rural people are more adversely affected than others. We can’t get to school, work, health services, shopping, leisure and so on without additional cost. Much of this is not a choice, it’s a necessity.
We often speak of rural proofing, looking at policy development and implementation, to see if there are different and unintended effects on rural people. The price of fuel has been considered over time and mitigated with something called the Rural Fuel Duty Relief Scheme since 2015. Cumbria qualifies for this relief in a limited way; it covers one postcode area only (LA17). The Lib Dems are asking for this premium to be increased and extended.
Recent research has suggested that, to access services, rural dwellers spend £800 a year more on travel costs than their urban counterparts. Many of you know these additional costs and have lived with them for a long time. With petrol at nearly £2 per litre, the need to travel for services is becoming a lot less affordable.
Rural communities are really good at finding creative ways to address challenges - community transport, lift shares, local subsidies of bus routes - are some of the organised options. The Federation of Young Farmers is an excellent example of informal, and organised lift sharing.
Many people in rural communities share lifts informally, and could do this more formally to reduce travel costs - we have a guidance sheet on this here.
While these local solutions will help, both in the short and longer term, we also need to be thinking about reducing travel to save carbon and costs. We need to reduce carbon from travel in Cumbria by 64% in order to meet the 2035 target. How will this affect rural people?
This is a discussion we would like to have with you. Just saying it’s unfair, which may have some reality to it, won’t help those who cannot afford to travel.
Some solutions we could work towards:
- Lobbying for more fuel relief for sparse rural areas
- Working together on local solutions like lift-sharing
- Bringing services to local hubs - ‘20 minute neighbourhoods’ are worth talking about
- Thinking about travelling less by planning what we do - the shopping, the dentist, etc, in each journey
- Using our local services, like the village hall, local shop, milk deliveries.
Rural poverty is a complex issue and the rising cost of fuel is just one element of it - but we can make a difference with our own actions and by working with others.