Hansard

Thank you very much for having us. I will start and then pass over to Laura Robertson to talk about some of our work. For context, I should say that I have been working more on the quantitative side of the research and Laura Robertson has been working more on the qualitative side. If you could direct your questions accordingly, it will probably make more sense for us. However, we will try to answer as well as we can on both sides of the work. The additional costs faced by disabled people are recognised as being detrimental to quality of life. For any given income, a disabled person is not able to realise the same standard of living as a non-disabled person. Additional costs are many and varied, and they depend on individual circumstances, including type of disability, household composition and rurality. Those additional costs are concerning not only from the point of view of fairness, but because the impact of poorer living standards is also potentially significant and can lead to poorer wellbeing and health outcomes over the short and long term. In recognition of those higher additional costs for disabled people, a system of disability benefits has long been established as part of the UK social security system, and it is now part of the devolved benefits system in Scotland. The Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 states that Scotland’s social security system will be designed “on the basis of evidence”. However, to our knowledge, there is no Scotland-specific baseline for the scale of additional costs that are faced by disabled people. This report takes a step towards a better understanding of the additional costs of disability in Scotland. We have looked at the limited data that is available to analyse the scale of additional spending that disabled people in Scotland face. To contextualise and supplement our findings from the national survey data, we have also worked with six disabled Scottish residents, who, through weekly diaries and interviews over a five-week period, have provided us with information about their extra costs and their experiences of accessing support. On definitions, we refer in the research to the core definition of disability in the Equality Act 2010, which states that a person is disabled if they have a “physical or mental impairment” that has a “substantial and long-term” negative impact on their ability to do normal activities. In that context, “long-term” refers to a condition that lasts or is expected to last 12 months or more, and “substantial” refers to the condition having a non-trivial impact on daily activities. A bit later, we will talk about severity of disability. Normally, in national surveys, people, in referring to their disability, can say that they are limited in their daily activities either a little or a lot. Therefore, when we talk about severity and a more severe disability, we are referring to the category of “a lot”. I will give you a preview of our findings before we take you through them properly. They show that the best available data is far from perfect and cannot tell us enough at this stage. We found some evidence of additional spending on food, energy and health, and less spending by disabled households on transport. We cannot say whether the additional costs in the spending data that we used are statistically significant, because of the small sample sizes, but they are persistent over time, which gives us some trust that they are true effects. Importantly, data on spending also does not capture what needs are not being met due to a lack of income or what support is being received that might already compensate for additional costs. We will start by going through what the data can tell us, starting with findings across all disabled households versus non-disabled households in Scotland, and Laura Robertson will take us through some of the qualitative findings. We will then go into some of the breakdowns that we have done, including for urban versus rural households, and more statistics on severe disabilities and extra spending in that respect. I will just provide a bit of an introduction to the data that we use in the report. It comes from the living costs and food survey, which contains expenditure data for individuals and households across the whole of the UK. It is the best expenditure data that we have available for our purposes, as it is designed to be representative of the UK population, and it indicates whether each household member has a disability and allows us to look specifically at Scotland. We have supplemented that with findings from the weekly diaries that I mentioned—that is, from six disabled people in Scotland over a five-week period between January and February 2024. To provide some context, I would point out that the diaries are not designed to represent all disabled individuals—we would never claim that with only six diaries. Instead, they provide some context for the lived experience of additional costs related to disability, including the potential drivers of those costs and other available support and how they interact with people’s lives. We also wanted to look at the impact of the continued higher costs of living in 2024, which the data that we have cannot provide, given that the latest data that we have available is from 2021-22. If you have copies of our report available, you will see that table 1 and figure 1 show the additional spending by disabled households in Scotland compared with spending by non-disabled households across four essential categories: food, energy, transport and health. I will provide a bit of a primer in how to read those figures, because it might not be intuitive. A positive number in a box means that disabled households are spending more on that category. For example, a non-disabled household might have spent £20 per week on health. If a disabled household had spent £21 per week—that is, £1 more—the box would show a positive number 1 to represent the difference in spending. 10:15 We then looked at mean total spending across those categories and subtracted the numbers for non-disabled households from those for disabled households to find the difference. If the result was a positive number, that meant that disabled households were spending more; if negative, it meant that non-disabled households were spending more. Our main finding was that there was slightly extra spending by disabled households on food, energy and health, and less spending on the transport category. Actual spending is a lot more variable than the means show, due to different household incomes, which is why we split the sample into income groups. Instead of comparing, say, a disabled household on a really low income with a non-disabled one on a really high income—which we would not want to do, because their spending is probably wildly different anyway—we made our goal to compare like with like. We therefore split our sample of households into five equally sized categories, with income group 1 the 20 per cent lowest incomes and income group 5 the 20 per cent highest incomes. We always compare disabled and non-disabled households that have similar levels of income, to understand where the differences are. The chart in figure 1 shows the difference in mean expenditure across all the income groups, and you will see the variety across them. Table 1 shows the mean difference in expenditure. For example, the figure for food is 0; for energy, 1; for transport, -17; and for health, 2. We have therefore seen slight additional spending across food, energy and health and less spending on transport. One point to note is that the mean of the food expenditure is 0, which means that we are not seeing additional spending once we average everything out across the five income groups. However, when we looked at previous years, we saw additional spending on food, so inflation has potentially had an effect there. All low-income households will have spent more of their income on food in 2021-22. If they have a limited amount of money to spend on food each week, the limit could be reached faster in disabled households than in non-disabled ones, due to the additional costs associated with disability. Laura Henderson will touch on this much more, but, when we looked at the data, one of our first realisations was that we were not seeing any unmet need in it. We were seeing only what people were able to spend money on, not what they were unable to. Our data shows that disabled households spend less than non-disabled households on transport, and we believe that that effect is down to a combination of factors. First, disabled people take fewer trips on average than non-disabled people. We have evidence of that from a Department for Transport study carried out across the UK in 2017. Secondly, disabled people are more likely to have access to free transport via a free bus pass or similar. I reiterate that we have covered only spending data; we are not seeing use of services in our figures, but we will touch on that a bit later. Social support might cover expenditure that we would otherwise see in our figures if such support were not available. Laura Robertson will now talk about one of the case studies from our diaries.