Proiseact Speird - The Speird Project: understanding influences on fuel poverty in rural and island Scotland

Spéird, loosely translated, means energy or force, but a slight change to that pronunciation and the meaning becomes to critically examine something, and it is only through critical, agnostic, examination that we can begin to disentangle complexity, question common assumptions, and ultimately differentiate what we know from what we think we know. The Spéird Project validates and substantially expands findings from a previous project on fuel poverty funded internally by Glasgow Caledonian University and supported by Renfrewshire Council. This found significant differences between the amount of money urban and rural households in Renfrewshire spend on fuel for heating, and raised numerous questions over the validity of common assumptions and proxies used to identify and support fuel poor households in Scotland. This new project, which was only made possible by the support of the Eaga Charitable Trust, was
able to bring together a wider partnership of organisations who were able to use their existing records, support services, local knowledge, and trusted statuses to build and analyse a set of highly robust datasets to investigate the technical, socio-economic and geographical influences on fuel poverty in Scotland. It also includes a pilot study to gather qualitative evidence on the energy
behaviours of households in the highlands.