Household Earnings Fall
This article explains
“UK households are facing pay cuts in real terms of more than 3.5% as salary increases fail to keep pace with inflation, official figures reveal. The median salary for a full-time worker in theUKrose 1.4% in 2011 to £26,244, against a headline CPI inflation rate of 5% or higher, according to the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings from the Office for National Statistics.”
Now this will have a disproportionate effect in rural England where the cost of living is considerably higher. I am not just offering this view off the top of my head Loughborough University in work paid for by the Commission for Rural Communities in 2010 found it costs everyone in rural England more to have a minimum standard of living than in urban England, with some groups such as single working age adults needing to find 24% more than their urban contemporaries to have the same minimum standard of life.