Yes, there is quite a lot of information on the reasons for take-up being low, although there is less information on trends. You mentioned that I have worked in your constituency. Twenty-five years ago, I did a study on these matters, with Harris as one of the study areas. Harris is also one of the study areas in our new project on rural lives, so we have been there again and we are trying to see what the differences might be.
It would be helpful if I talked through some of the explanations for lower take-up, including the one that you highlighted, which is that the older generation is resistant and very concerned about visibility, privacy and stigma in small communities. We and other researchers have found that that is the case not just in rural areas on the islands, but across rural Scotland—and in Northumberland, where I have recently done some work—and I know that it is a feature from studies that have been done in rural America. It is a feature of small rural communities in developed countries around the world.
In addition, we found in our work that members of the older generation often do not see themselves as poor. The issues are similar to those raised by Professor Spicker, but couched in a different way. People say, “When I grew up, we did not have running water, electricity or television and now we have all those things. How can we be poor?” The reference point is often their own past rather than the everyday lifestyles of the majority today. That is a barrier. The question of how you overcome that is a quite difficult, ethical one. Do you want to persuade somebody that they are poor? You do, in the sense that you want them to have the benefits, but you do not want them to change their view of themselves in a harmful way.
Another reason that we have come across in the literature and in our current work is that sources of advice and information are distant, as they are often located in urban centres. That has become more of an issue as the benefit system has become more and more complex, so it is probably more necessary to have advice and support, not just when someone makes an initial claim, but when they have to fill in journals and attend assessments regularly, have appeals and all the rest of it.
So much is now online, which was not the case 25 years ago when we were working in Harris and other areas of rural Scotland. That is a really important issue for rural claimants and rural take-up, not only because of the poor digital infrastructure—whether there is broadband or a mobile signal, for example—but because of the cost of a digital connection. Can the claimant afford broadband? If they are just relying on a mobile phone, is it pay as you go, which runs out 20 minutes into the hour and a half long session that they need to have? How do they get support when they are trying to work online? Where do they go to go online? Do they go to a public library—if there is still a public library near them? Do they have to spread out their personal papers and keep running over to the counter to ask somebody to help them, with everything spread out for the world to see?
Another reason is housing tenure. There is quite a lot of research that shows that people who live in social housing are more likely to be informed and helped with support in relation to the availability of benefits, both from their social landlords, but also from their peers. That is an issue given that people who live in private housing in rural areas are more likely to be living in poverty.
Those things are well established in the literature. One or two other things are beginning to emerge from our rural lives project, although this is very preliminary, as we have only really just started doing fieldwork in two areas in rural Scotland. One is the worry that people have about moving on to universal credit because of the disability assessment regime, which they perceive to be very threatening. They perceive that if they move on to universal credit they are more likely to be subjected to sanctions that stop all their benefits and leave them in a much worse position. Even when they are told that they could be getting quite a lot more money by making that move on to universal credit, they see the risks as not worth taking.
Related to that, and not only for disability benefits, are the unpredictability and volatility of incomes in many rural areas, whether that is do with seasonality or casual work, with people having a number of jobs. It seems that there is quite a lot of evidence of unpredictability and volatility of incomes, which lead to worries about overpayment—people are not aware of overpayment happening, and then they have to repay that debt. In a sense, they see that as going into debt and they are worried about sanctions and all sorts of things as a result of that volatility of income.
If it helps the committee, I can talk about a separate piece of work that we have been doing that is along the lines that Professor Bell talked about and which is looking at longitudinal data. We have been analysing the British household panel survey, in which households are interviewed every year, and comparing rural households to urban households not just in Scotland but across Britain over the period since 1990. It appears that the proportion of people who have been in poverty at some point over that period is almost the same in rural and urban areas—50 per cent of the people in rural households were poor at some point from 1991 to 2008, compared to 55 per cent of the people in urban households. It also appears that the periods spent in poverty tend to be quite short. That reinforces and underlines the point about volatility of income and people moving in and out of poverty. It is about that churn.
You asked about trends. The other major trend that we see is the increased use of food banks. There are all sorts of issues around that. You will have seen on the news a couple of days ago that we have had a very important report from the Trussell Trust about who is using food banks and the reasons for that. I will not repeat what it says, but you will be aware of that.