Consumer group Which? have used our Priority Places for Food Index to highlight the neighbourhoods in Scotland most in need of support to access food during the current cost of living crisis.

As part of their recent Policy research paper – Consumers in Scotland – a food briefing – Which? identified ten Parliamentary Constituencies where over half of the neighbourhoods are a priority place.

Constituency Name	Neighbourhoods in constituency	Proportion of neighbourhoods that are priority places	Rank (out of 73 Scottish parliamentary constituencies)
Cunninghame South	92	71%	1
Cunninghame North	94	69%	2
Glasgow Provan	98	68%	3
Greenock and Inverclyde	107	62%	4
Glasgow Pollok	101	61%	5
Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley	108	60%	6
Glasgow Anniesland	92	57%	7
Glasgow Maryhill and Springburn	90	53%	8
Dumbarton	102	52%	9
Dundee City West	94	51%	10

Note: Which? Analysis of the Priority Places for Food index. Data Zones 2011 are matched to Scottish Parliamentary constituencies and electoral regions using 2011 Data Zone Lookups from statistics.gov.scot.

 

What is a priority place for food?

Priority places are neighbourhoods most at risk of food insecurity, and where interventions to help people access affordable food will be most valuable.

There are many reasons why people may find it difficult to access affordable food. 

Some relate to individuals’ circumstances, like lower incomes. Other reasons relate to the place that someone lives, such as the level of retail provision or the quality of public transport. In the case of accessing affordable food online, barriers may be both place-based (limited or no online deliveries) or related to the individual (limited capability to shop online).

Which? is calling on the Scottish Government and Supermarkets to help those most at risk of food insecurity – find out more and read the full report.

What is the Priority Place for Food Index?

The Priority Places for Food Index – developed by Dr Michelle Morris, Dr Pete Baudains and Dr Fran Pontin in collaboration with Which? – is a composite index formed of data compiled across seven different dimensions relating to food insecurity for the four nations in the UK. It is constructed using open data to capture complex and multidimensional aspects of food insecurity.

Building on the CDRC e-Food Desert Index, from Dr Andy Newing, but with additional domains relating to fuel poverty and family food support, the goal of the Priority Places for Food Index is to identify neighbourhoods that are most vulnerable to increases in the cost of living and which have a lack of accessibility to affordable, healthy, and sustainable sources of food.

The index is developed at the geographic level of Lower Super Output Areas in England and Wales, Data Zones in Scotland and Super Output Areas in Northern Ireland (2011 boundaries). Data for all countries is included where possible, but some indicators are not available across all countries.

Andy Newing, University of Leeds

Before the pandemic, online grocery shopping was typically something younger and more affluent people living in cities indulged in. When COVID hit, though, the market exploded.

In the first week of the first UK lockdown, demand for Ocado home deliveries was reportedly ten times higher than it had been the week before. But when COVID restrictions were re-imposed in September 2020, the online supermarket, like its competitors, was still warning customers that slots were selling out fast. So fast, in fact, one staffer said they were going “like Glastonbury tickets.”

Households struggled to book delivery slots, as supermarkets rightly prioritised deliveries for elderly and vulnerable consumers. And retailers hustled to capitalise on this rapid growth.

In April 2020, Tesco told its customers it had hired 12,000 extra staff and 4,000 new delivery drivers. Six months in, Sainsbury’s said it was delivering 700,000 online orders per week, having effectively doubled its capacity.

In 2019, prior to the pandemic, my colleagues and I mapped online groceries coverage by all the major UK grocers, using the “check if we deliver to your area” tool on their websites. We found that where you live affects your choice and availability of online groceries.

People in rural areas have less access to supermarkets in general and, when it comes to online grocery shopping, just over 11% of those people have no choice at all.

Lack of choice

When households order groceries online from the major supermarkets, their orders are usually assembled in a local supermarket, what industry insiders term an “online fulfilment store”. These have dedicated staff, storage space, vehicles and drivers.

This model, however, means that online groceries are not available in all locations. Rather, they are concentrated around the network of stores that each grocer operates.

On each supermarket website we inputted one postcode from each of the 41,735 neighbourhoods in Great Britain – representing 25.7m households – and recorded the result. We then counted the number of retailers delivering to each neighbourhood.

We found that 98% of households in Great Britain are served by at least one of Tesco, Sainsbury’s or Asda. These three grocers offer the greatest delivery coverage, particularly in urban and suburban areas where households have a choice of grocer providing home delivery.

Other grocers have more restricted coverage. Iceland, a budget retailer with stores in urban areas, serves only 86% of households. Ocado, meanwhile, which is more upmarket and online only, delivers to only 77% of households.

Many neighbourhoods – in south-west and northern England, south and mid-Wales, and in Scotland’s borders, highlands and islands – suffer poor coverage of online groceries.

Households in many neighbourhoods in Argyll and Bute (Scotland), for example, have a single online groceries provider (Tesco). By contrast, in nearby Glasgow, most neighbourhoods have a choice of six online grocery providers.

Across Great Britain, we found that over 11% of households in the most remote rural areas have no choice of provider. They must rely on a single grocer (typically Tesco) for online groceries.

Why retailers are not expanding into rural areas

Rural areas that are underserved by supermarkets in general are precisely those that could benefit the most from better online provision. In urban contexts, the older, higher spending consumer demographic was newly converted to online grocery shopping.

In rural areas, this same demographic could therefore represent untapped demand. In other words, there is an incentive for retailers to expand there.

But that is not happening. We had rare access to data about the nationwide network of Sainsbury’s stores. Over 180 of those supermarkets are in London and south-east England, 85 of which are used as online fulfilment stores. This means the retailer is able to deliver groceries to all neighbourhoods in these regions.

In Wales, by contrast, there are only four Sainsbury’s online fulfilment stores concentrated around the major towns and cities in south Wales. We found that home delivery by Sainsbury’s was unavailable to 162,000 Welsh households (12%).

Even if all existing Sainsbury’s supermarkets in Wales were used for online deliveries, over 25% of neighbourhoods would still be more than 40km from their nearest fulfilment store. Drivers could have to travel over 100km to make their deliveries. This is prohibitively expensive and inefficient.

To expand online groceries coverage beyond the store network, retailers would need to fork out considerable sums to build more stores. Most, however, have cut back on supermarket expansion plans, focusing instead on smaller convenience stores to reflect changing shopper behaviours.

Amid changing consumer behaviours, online remains a key battleground for grocers. However, it offers lower profit margins than in-store shopping due to the higher costs of order preparation and delivery.

Another solution is the partnership model between grocers and online platforms such as Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo, who collect customer orders from smaller convenience stores (such as Tesco Express).

New players like the Turkish online-only grocer Getir offer rapid delivery services using smaller, more efficient warehouses located close to the customers. However, these, too, are confined to urban areas, for now.

Not being able to choose where you shop has several adverse impacts. It can restrict competition in online groceries, which in turn can see customers faced with less choice of delivery slot or higher charges for home delivery.

And, as highlighted by the consumer choice champion Which? and the Consumer Data Research Centre, it can hamper access to affordable, healthy groceries, by limiting customers’ opportunity to shop around for the best deals and widest range.

Quite how this might change though boils down to whether the major grocers or the new innovators are able to make the investments needed to better cater to rural demand. Until then, customers in these areas will face the dual disadvantage of poor access to larger supermarkets and fewer online grocery options to improve things.

Andy Newing, Associate Professor in Applied Spatial Analysis, University of Leeds

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) at Leeds delivers insights into human behaviour using consumer and commercial datasets, and we are looking for a Research Fellow in Urban Mobility who can help us deliver greater impact from our data assets and projects.

We’re seeking an ambitious Research Fellow in Urban Mobility fascinated by urban mobility data who can support work on advancing theory and methods relating to urban mobility and most crucially, work on emerging insights that ultimately have impacts on policy.

You will work closely with Professor Ed Manley, to develop new ideas and approaches for modelling urban mobility. You will gain experience in a rapidly developing, interdisciplinary field that will benefit a future career in academia or data science.

The successful candidate will have the opportunity to work with colleagues from Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, along with our external partners. We are currently working with Wejo and Spectus to make connected vehicle, mobility and location data more readily available for research purposes.

You will have an approach to research and level of technical expertise that allows you to draw out new insights and models of mobility behaviour from large datasets.

View job description and find out more.

The 2023 edition of GISRUK (Geographical Information Science Research UK) conference took place in late April at the University of Glasgow with over 150 delegates, and saw a strong representation from CDRC-aligned Ph.D students and centre staff, with one of the centre’s data scientists winning the Best Paper prize.

The paper, “Dominant Trip Purposes within a Dockless Bicycle Sharing System“, was presented by lead author Dr James Todd, with co-authors Oliver O’Brien, Shunya Kimura and Professor James Cheshire, all of the Department of Geography at UCL. The paper was one of three shortlisted in advance by conference organisers and then voted on by participants towards the end of the conference.

Other CDRC staff and student presentations included Dr Meixu Chen on “Creating an energy deprivation classification at small areas in England and Wales“, Fransesca Pontin on “Identifying areas at highest food insecurity through open data: the “Priority Places for Food Index“, Louise Sieg on “Regionalising mobile phone data: attributing time components to optimised regions to create region classifications“, Eliott Karikari on “Analysing Connected Car Data to Understand Vehicular Route Choice“, Shunya Kimura on “The Use of Consumer Data to Explore Geographic and Social Variations in Online Gambling“, Nikki Tanu on “Residential Telephone Directories and Geodemographic Change in Britain” and Rob Davidson on “Levelling Up Health: A Review of UK Datasets on Place-based Measures of Health Inequality“. Additionally, Hamish Gibbs and Mikaella Mavrogeni showed posters entitled “Detecting bias within location histories collected from a panel of mobile applications” and “The use of in-app data to drive geodemographic classification of activity patterns” respectively.

CDRC was also a conference sponsor and had a stand at the event’s poster session, showcasing some of the latest CDRC research and also the Consumer Data Research book produced by the centre and published by UCL Press. CDRC staff outlined the centre’s mission and modus operandi, and a number of copies of the book were given to interested attendees.

Photos © University of Glasgow photography team.

The CDRC Priority Places for Food team were invited to the House of Commons earlier this week in order to share their work on food insecurity.

The event, ‘Tackling the Cost of Food Crisis’, was set up to share new research, led by Which?, on the availability of budget range options in small and large supermarket stores, and to launch a new film by The Food Foundation highlighting the lived experiences of those living in the areas of highest food insecurity.

CDRC’s Priority Places for Food Index (developed last year in collaboration with Which?) emphasises that food (in)security is determined both by access to food and the obstacles blocking access to that food. As a result, this event brought together policymakers, MPs, charity organisations and those with lived experiences of food insecurity and diet-related ill health, with the joint objectives of working together to improve access to affordable food and to remove the social barriers currently limiting access to that food.

The Priority Places for Food Index demonstrates that access to supermarkets plays an important part in the UK’s food security. Good access to supermarkets includes both online access (including availability of online delivery as well as the likelihood of individuals in a particular location to shop online) as well as in-person access (including proximity, travel time, and travel options to supermarkets).

Which? calls on supermarkets to do more

Which? took this research further, by exploring what choices consumers have if they have limited access to larger supermarkets and need to shop in smaller stores. Their research involved sending a team of mystery shoppers into 123 different-sized branches of Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco across the UK to assess the availability of a range of essential budget groceries.

Each shopper was armed with a list of around 29 different basic budget groceries to find in each store, and the results show that those core budget items were almost all available in larger stores, and almost all unavailable in smaller stores.

The shopping list used by Which? was developed in collaboration with CDRC researchers, and the outcomes of Which?’s research emphasised that having access to supermarkets was not always a guarantee that consumers could access affordable food. In fact, the items available in different-sized stores are not configured to cater to the areas in which those stores are located, but in fact based on store size (with a larger range of budget items available in larger stores, not areas of greater need).

Which? have called on retailers to do more to tackle food insecurity by ensuring budget ranges are available in smaller stores, using the Priority Places for Food Index as an example of how to determine which areas in the UK need access to affordable food most urgently. You can sign their #AffordableFoodForAll campaign here.

The Food Foundation – Sharing lived experiences

The powerful and emotional film launched by The Food Foundation focused on the lived experience of Melissa, who lives in Solihull, and who describes how difficult it is to feed her children during the cost of living crisis.

The Food Foundation used the Priority Places for Food Index to determine an area of particularly high food insecurity – Birmingham – and in the video, uses the expertise of GP Dr Ewan Hamnett to highlight the long-lasting health implications of food insecurity for individuals and, more long-term, the additional stress health inequalities are likely to place on the health and social care systems in future.

Alongside the launch of this video, the Food Foundation have made demands on both retailers and Government to ensure everyone can survive the cost of living crisis and eat well.

In particular, The Food Foundation called for the expansion and strengthening of the healthy start voucher and free school meal schemes.

The Priority Places for Food Index includes the eligibility and uptake data for these schemes. You can read more about the work CDRC has done previously on free school meals here, and read also how Dr Michelle Morris’s work with retailers has evidenced the value in expanding the healthy start voucher scheme.

What happens next?

The event was a reminder to all attendees that the cost-of-living crisis and its impacts are not going away any time soon, and that in order to effect change we need to get a clear picture of the extent of the problem.

The combined effect of the Priority Places for Food Index, Which?’s secret shopper research, and the accounts of lived experiences provided via The Food Foundation provide the evidence necessary to prompt action, with many attendees at the event signing the declaration on affordable food put forward jointly by Which? and The Food Foundation.

Furthermore, guests at the event were able to spend time using the Priority Places for Food Index, exploring how they as individuals or organisations can use it to develop targeted interventions to improve food security.

Which? also used Priority Places data to provide constituency-level evidence packs for the MPs in attendance, placing the evidence of the levels of food insecurity and contributing factors to that insecurity into the hands of decisionmakers.

Journalist and Radio 4 presenter Sheila Dillon, who chaired the event, said that it was hard not to be moved by the video created by The Food Foundation, and on Twitter noted that coming together for the event – with representation from both the Conservative and Labour parties – gave her hope that ‘democracy might be working’.

Dr Emily Ennis, Research and Impact Manager, Consumer Data Research Centre (Leeds)

We have been working with Wejo to make connected vehicle data available for academic research purposes.

We have today launched a new dataset, supplied by Wejo, which contains GPS trajectories for around 50,000 vehicles during the month of July, representing over 1.8 million vehicle journeys and over 400 million individual records. An observation is available every 3 seconds on average during each journey.

The data contains a journey identifier, timestamp, longitude and latitude coordinates, as well as additional data fields for vehicle speed and bearing. The data is of high quality, with GPS records for every three seconds on average. This enables the successful implementation of map-matching algorithms as well as the identification of vehicle stops as well as periods of acceleration and deceleration.

This is one of the first times such a detailed and in-depth dataset detailing connected vehicle trajectories has been made available for academic research purposes.

This data is available via our Secure data service – find out more and apply.

Ten years ago, the Economic and Social Research Council funded a nationwide collaborative Masters Dissertation Scheme for the first time. Over the years, businesses, government and third sector organisations have collaborated with universities throughout the UK to allow Masters students to develop practical solutions to problems through applied research, often using their own sources of data that are not usually available for student projects. Sponsoring organisations solve problems, students get real world problem-solving experience, and many students have gone on to work for the organisations that sponsored their research projects. This year’s projects can be viewed here. As in previous years, there is likely to be very considerable interest in these projects, so interested students are advised to apply as soon as possible!