As Britons look forward to performances of Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been casting forecourt operators as pantomime villains.
Among the tax and spend measures outlined in last week’s Budget, she declared she was “calling out rip-offs” in petrol retailing, claiming the government’s Fuel Finder scheme would be “empowering drivers to find the cheapest fuel”.
No one is against measures to make the fuel market – any market – more transparent, although arguably the sector is not holding back here, displaying fuel prices on totems. Transparency is how a market economy functions successfully, allowing consumers to make informed purchasing decisions.
However, the language used by the controller of the nation’s purse-strings has caused consternation in the industry. Painting fuel retailers as scheming profiteers out to rip off honest motorists is the sort of cheap smear normally associated with tabloid newspapers and populist rabble rousers.
But to hear it from the second most powerful politician in the land is nothing short of shocking.
In a letter to Chancellor Reeves on Friday, the Petrol Retailers Association’s executive director Gordon Balmer put it perfectly when he claimed her words were “derogatory”, and appearing “to imply the existence of dishonesty and profiteering in the retail fuel sector”.
He said her rhetoric was “inflammatory and disrespectful” of an industry that works tirelessly to support its local communities, with everything from electric vehicle charging to providing a ready-meal or pint of milk at all hours of the night.
Let’s be clear, our industry is made up of entrepreneurs who work extremely hard to provide an essential service without which the economy and society would simply not function.
An under-pressure Reeves may simply have been delivering an easy soundbite she thought would go down well with a public frustrated by the soaring cost of living. However, more worryingly, it suggests a deeply held view within Sir Keir Starmer’s government that the sector is routinely exploiting the motorist.
Perhaps cabinet ministers with their personal staff and chauffeur driven cars do not have to rely on their local forecourt to fill up or for midnight or pre-dawn sustenance. But plenty of their constituents – from commuters to shift workers – do. Without 24-hour forecourts, many of these people simply could not do their jobs.
Petrol stations are, in fact, vital cogs of the economy and their communities. The ACS’s latest Forecourt Report found that 78% of petrol retailing businesses engaged in some sort of community activity in the past year, and the industry provides 85,000 jobs across Great Britain.
And bear in mind what forecourt retailers must put up with, from rising energy and staff costs to high interest rates. Add to that soaring levels of crime, from drive-offs and pilfering that police refuse to investigate to outright threats and violence to staff. Being a forecourt operator is no easy ride.
If the Chancellor bothered to spend some time visiting the industry she so casually denigrated in the Commons, she might come across operators like Forecourt Trader of the Year 2025 David Charman. He said after hearing Reeves’s ‘rip-off’ accusations that the government needs educating on what running a retail business really looks like in today’s climate.
Like numerous other readers, Charman told us how he resents the charge of being part of a rip-off industry, having put so much into running a best-in-class outlet, investing close to a million pounds in improvements to his forecourt store this year, and not having closed its doors to customers for four decades.
So, Chancellor, as you look forward to taking your well-deserved few days off over the festive period, spare a thought for the petrol retailers who won’t be on leave, but instead will be keeping the nation fuelled, fed, and refreshed…even on Christmas Day.
Far from being villains, forecourt operators are heroes: hard-working, holiday-shunning champions of their communities and vital to the economy. Oh yes, they are!
