Forecourt Trader has uncovered the latest in a long line of serious errors with Fuel Finder, with every supermarket petrol station in the country being labelled a non-supermarket site, and none of the filling stations marked ‘supermarket’ being run by any of the four major chains.
The Fuel Finder database contains a number of fields including petrol and diesel prices, site opening hours and whether an individual petrol station is attached to a supermarket.
The supermarket field is labelled ‘forecourts is supermarket service station’ [sic], with the only entry options being ‘true’ or ‘false’.
Of the 7,874 filling stations registered with Fuel Finder as of 14 May, 800 are labelled as supermarket sites. But not one of these is operated by the ‘big four’ supermarkets.
Meanwhile, all 1,493 filling stations listed under Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons brands are classified as non-supermarket sites.
Supermarkets typically sell petrol and diesel more cheaply than other retailers due to their purchasing power, and a willingness to make less profit on fuel in the knowledge a large proportion of drivers will fill shopping trolleys as well as cars.
Because of this, supermarket retailers are often excluded from or counted separately in price analyses, meaning the mislabelling could have a significant impact both on consumer-facing price reports, and monitoring carried out by the Competition and Markets Authority.
The categorical nature of the error means fault may reside with VE3 Global, which won the government contract to build and run Fuel Finder, rather than the supermarkets themselves, while the government contract for Fuel Finder requires VE3 Global to “cleanse” and “validate” the data it collects.
A statement released by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), which oversees the scheme, implies it believes all four supermarkets have mislabelled their 1,493 forecourts. A spokesperson said: “Fuel retailers are responsible for submitting accurate information to Fuel Finder.”
The latest Fuel Finder dataset also includes serious pricing errors despite VE3 Global and DESNZ having been made aware of similar mistakes some weeks ago.
Unleaded is apparently available for as little as 1.29p or as much as £16.49 a litre, while diesel can be had for between 1.79p and £18.99 according to Fuel Finder. Such errors are likely due to individual forecourt operators putting the decimal point in the wrong place when updating their prices, but should have been picked up by the system, as should the multiple forecourts that are still located in the middle of the North Sea based on their latitude and longitude entries.
VE3 Global has been approached for comment.
