The Competition and Markets Authority has written an open letter for forecourt firms warning them that from next month it intends to begin enforcement action against non-compliance with Fuel Finder.
Under the heading ”Enforcement priorities and the situation in the Middle East”, the watchdog says that it “will start prioritising enforcement action against non-compliance from Friday 1 May 2026”.
Fuel Finder requires petrol-station operators to report any unleaded or diesel price changes within 30 minutes of them being made, with the CMA having the power to issue penalties equalling 30% of a company’s UK turnover for the most serious breaches.
The law enforcing Fuel Finder came into force on 2 February, and at the time the watchdog said that for the first three months of the scheme’s operation it would focus on compliance with regulations rather than their enforcement.
That three-month grace period is now up, leading the CMA to alert firms that they risk being fined for non-compliance with the programme.
This is despite Fuel Finder experiencing myriad issues. Registration for the scheme opened more than two weeks late, and some operators are still unable to register their sites. Poor data cleansing, meanwhile, has seen fuel prices of £15 a litre being shared with consumers, while some sites’ location data place them in the middle of the ocean.
This last aspect led to VE3 Global, the firm that won the government contract to build and administer Fuel Finder, recently alerting retailers that it will contact “operators with suspected inaccurate longitude and latitude” asking them to review their registration data.
The CMA says firms wanting to resolve issues with Fuel Finder should “continue working with VE3”, but warned that it will begin enforcement from May “if it receives information from VE3 that indicates formal action may be appropriate”.
The Competition and Markets Authority’s letter, send on Thursday 2 April, also states one of the reasons it introduced Fuel Finder was that “drivers often cannot easily compare up‑to‑date prices across nearby forecourts”. This is despite PetrolPrices being founded in 2005, and offering coverage of 93% of forecourts’ prices before the multimillion-pound scheme was introduced.
