Fuel Finder has been subject to so much coverage across mainstream outlets this week that one should really talk about column yards rather than inches. But in the hubbub surrounding the scheme’s launch, little heed has been paid to whether it will actually achieve its intended aims.
Briefly, the mandatory price-reporting project was brought into law because the Competition and Markets Authority and the Department for Net Zero and Energy Security (DESNZ) felt drivers weren’t getting a fair deal at the pumps.
Leaving Westminster’s love of attacking all things car and oil-related aside, one has to ask whether mandating that petrol stations make their prices available for all and sundry to see could actually push the average cost of a litre up.
In Australia, similar state-based schemes have seen forecourt firms monitor prices at rival ‘servos’ and adjust their own pole signs accordingly, at times not acting in the spirit of the law, shall we say. And in Germany retailers change their totems as often as 35 times a day, an insane practice caused in part by publicly available per-litre prices.
The impact mandatory reporting will have on rural forecourts, where fuel prices tend to be comparatively high, should also be closely considered, especially when (and I’d put money on this happening) by the end of the year some wag of a journalist will have consulted Fuel Finder to run a ‘Most expensive petrol stations in the country’ countdown that thoroughly fails to consider both the high delivery prices isolated sites must pay, and the vital roles they play in their communities.
Given governments are often perceived as able to think only as far ahead as the next general election, it’s understandable if undesirable that such second-order effects may not have registered on Whitehall’s radar.
Fuel Finder is, however, an interventionist fiscal instrument, and therefore cuts to the quick of economic theory: should governments tinker with a market, or leave it to its own devices? Clearly the latter has been chosen for forecourts and all, according to the Chancellor herself, to save motorists the princely sum of £40 a year, far less than the amount DESNZ’s ‘green’ levies have already added to everyone’s annual energy bills.
None of this is to say that oil majors and forecourt firms are hard-done-by charitable institutions in need of coddling. But of all the policies to implement, not least given running a UK business is anything other than straightforward these days, Fuel Finder seems an unusual choice that speaks of misplaced priorities and disjointed thinking. After all, when was the last you heard someone complain about the cost of a litre of unleaded in casual conversation?
