Rural Residents Pay £3,300 More Than City Dwellers on Everyday Essentials – Report
This report provides a contemporary spin on the work undertaken by Joseph Rowntree Foundation a few years ago. It helps us remember that it is a significant financial stretch for people to live in rural England. It tells us:
New analysis of household spending in Britain’s rural communities reveals a gap of more than £3300 a year spent on everyday essentials like petrol and groceries compared to those living in towns and cities – the equivalent of £15.8 billion each year across the UK.
The findings come from BoilerJuice Connected and show that the cost of living in the British countryside has been rising at 29 per cent more than the average national rate.
BoilerJuice Connected is a new service that enables heating oil customers to digitally monitor their heating oil usage and arrange top-ups.
The research identified the 20 everyday items that rural households are most dependent on and calculated an overall inflation rate for them using a similar methodology to that used to measure the official Consumer Price Index inflation rate.
Extra spending on key items for country dwellers was mainly due to the costs of transport, petrol and domestic fuels, each of which affect residents of rural communities more because they are typically more dependent on cars, drive further and are less likely to be on the power grid.