Trading Standards officers have detected 98 instances of pumps dispensing less fuel than indicated in the four and a half years since prices began to spike following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Breakdown and insurance firm the AA, whose driving-school arm was this year fined £4.2m by the Competition and Markets Authority and ordered to refund learners over hidden fees, described the miscalibrated pumps as a “rip off” to the Daily Telegraph after the paper submitted a series of freedom of information requests to local councils to obtain the information.
Working on the assumption that the average forecourt hosts four pump islands, with each pump holding four flow meters (one per side, per grade), extrapolating those 98 devices indicates 0.07% of filling-station pumps could be dispensing “short” measures.
Earlier this year Trading Standards in Northern Ireland found 12 out of 371 pumps (3.2%) tested by officers were operating “outside the limit of error” – though the organisation didn’t detail if these devices were over or under-dispensing.
In one instance reported by The Telegraph, an unleaded pump at an Asda Express forecourt Tynemouth, Tyne and Wear, dispensed 76ml less than the 10 litres that was shown to have been drawn, a 0.76% variance and a breach of the 0.5% tolerance permitted under the Weights and Measures Act.
And two pumps at a petrol station at Welcome Break’s Charnock Richard services on the M6 were short by 170ml and 120ml 0n 20-litre measures, variations of 0.85% and 0.6% respectively.
Asda Express said the Tynemouth pump had been tested and found both to be under and over dispensing “most likely due to normal meter drift over time”, with the device being recalibrated before being recertified by Trading Standards.
Welcome Break, meanwhile, took the two under-dispensing pumps out of service and repaired them, describing the short measures as an “isolated incident”, and highlighting that another pump was found to be over dispensing.
The Telegraph said that because several councils’ Trading Standards departments had conducted no or limited tests at forecourts in recent years, “many cases” of miscalibrated pumps “are feared to have been missed”.
