Transcript Slide 1

Small Area Estimates of
Fuel Poverty in Scotland
Phil Clarke (ONS),
Ganka Mueller (Scottish Government)
Fuel Poverty Indicator
• A fuel poor household is one that would need
to spend more than 10% of its income on
adequate energy use
• Drivers:
 Thermal properties of the dwelling
 Price (type of fuel)
 Household income
Fuel Poverty Indicator: data sources
• Detailed property survey: building physics
model
• Household interview: income
• Scottish House Condition Survey (SHCS):
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

annual
~ 3000 households
32 Local Authority – 3 year combined data
Fuel Poverty Indicator: policy demand
• Section 88 Housing (Scotland) Act 2001:
establishes a duty to set out how the following
objective will be achieved (by 2016):
“… ensuring, so far as reasonably practicable,
that persons do not live in fuel poverty.”
• Policies and programmes: financial
assistance and energy efficiency upgrades
Targeting Interventions
Design and delivery:
• Area-based approach
 Home Energy Efficiency Programmes for Scotland
(HEEPS): around £60 m annually;
 Energy Company Obligation (ECO): Carbon
Saving Communities Obligation (CSCO)
• Cost effectiveness
Local area estimation
– Good timing for investigation
• Scottish House Conditions Survey can be
used to directly estimate fuel poverty at local
authority level
• Below this level direct estimates too
imprecise so there is a need to encompass
model-based techniques
• Recent availability of census local area
statistics means that timing is good for such
investigation.
Small area estimation models
• Framework is to associate sample survey
indicators with publicly available
administrative/census data for small areas.
• Fit a statistical model to describe this
association.
• Use this model to derive more precise
estimates for small areas.
• Here we have :
indicator = household fuel poverty status
small areas = Scotland Intermediate Zones (~1230)
Survey data available
SHCS individual household records
Two years of data giving 9121 respondents in 1231 of the total
1235 intermediate zones. Records coded by IZ.
Records have binary indicator variable for household fuel poor
or not
Distribution of
number of
responding
households by IZ
Auxiliary data available at IZ level
• For successful model based estimation auxiliary data
variables should correlate well with quantity of
interest.
• For this investigation a set of variables from three
main sources were considered -:
Census 2011 : indicators relating to household social,
employment, health and housing status;
Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics : DWP benefit claimant
rates and property council tax bandings;
Dept. of Energy and Climate Change : energy consumption
The underlying model
• Fuel poverty status is a binary variable
• So in modelling it we build a probability linking model
• Let pid be the probability that a household i living in
area d is fuel poor
• The equation linking pid with auxiliary data xd is a
multilevel logistic regression model:
 pid
logit  pid   ln 
 1  pid

T
    xd β  ud

ud ~ N 0, u2 
As auxiliary data is all at area level the individual probability
can be reinterpreted as the proportion of households in fuel
poverty in the area and denoted pd
Rationale for modelling
• SHCS data is aggregated to IZ area giving sample
proportions in fuel poverty.
• Then merged with appropriate IZ auxiliary data
variables.
• First a null model is fitted with no auxiliary data :
logit  pd     ud
ud ~ N 0,
2
u

•  u is a measure of unexplained between area variability
• Modelling then proceeds to fit a best set of auxiliary
variables as explanatory variables
2

• As variables are fitted the value of u reduces. This
value is a major determinant of precision of estimates.
2
Final fitted model
Variables in final fitted model are :
• Proportion of people aged 16 to 64 claiming income support
• Proportion of people in households who are living as couples
• Proportion of persons aged 16-74 whose NS-SEC is
‘managerial or professional’
• Average number of rooms per household
• Proportion of properties built before 1919
• Average Economy7 domestic electricity consumption
• Consumption of ordinary domestic electricity as a proportion of
total domestic energy consumption
• Interaction of “Consumption of ordinary domestic electricity as a
proportion of total domestic energy consumption” with “Average
number of rooms per household”
Using model to determine estimates
• Fitting a model determines parameter estimates
ˆ , βˆ and ˆu2. Also estimates are made of the
random effects uˆd .
• These are then applied to each area’s auxiliary data
to determine an estimate on the logistic scale,
ˆ  uˆ
IZ estimate ˆ  xTd β
d
2
T
ˆ )x
• Mean squared error of estimate = ˆu  xdVar (β
d
• Estimates on the logistic scale can then be back
transformed to probability scale using the function :
exp( x) /(1  exp( x))
Final fitted model – was it a success?
• Model fitted the data
well and passed
technical diagnostics.
• Reduction of  u2 from
null model = 79.7%.
• Estimate precision has
some drawbacks :
Coefficients of variation
can exceed 20%.
Final fitted model – was it a success?
Estimates and confidence intervals of proportion of
households in fuel poverty.
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Chart shows that vast majority of estimates between 20% and
35% with confidence intervals +/- 10 percentage points.
Only about 140 IZs at bottom of range (11.4% of total) can be
distinguished from same number at top of range.
Estimates
Estimates for central belt
Achievements and conclusions
• A methodology and a fully documented set of SAS
programs have been written permitting further
development.
• A set of estimates of fuel poverty for Intermediate
Zones with useful precision have been determined.
• Due to estimates being alike over a large number of
Intermediate Zones though, the precision measures
are not sufficiently good for high discrimination.
• The estimates though are sufficiently good for
general scale categorisation of areas.