Around 2,500 of the UK’s 8,300 filling stations are in breach of Fuel Finder regulations almost three weeks after the ‘go live’ date of 2 February.
As of 6am on February 19, some 7,181 of the UK’s 8,300-plus petrol stations had registered with the service, leaving around 1,200 stragglers in breach of regulations.
Further, while retailers are legally required to share petrol and diesel prices within 30 minutes of any changes being made, just 5,834 of registered stations are publising per-litre costs, leaving a further 1,347 non-compliant sites. The scheme therefore lacks pricing information for around 30% of the UK’s petrol stations.
A spokesperson for one operator that has over 100 sites registered with Fuel Finder but has yet to share prices told Forecourt Trader the company’s IT and fuel-pricing teams were working to ensure their software was perfected before integrating fully with the government’s system.
An industry source commenting on the data told Forecourt Trader:
“As of 19 February, there continues to be a significant shortfall in site registrations and price reporting.
“For operators trying to comply with Fuel Finder there has been a series of data challenges which includes duplicate sites, multiple prices being reported for a given fuel grade at a single site and prices that are clearly inaccurate – in an extreme case a price of 1.2ppl was published.
“These data challenges can result in consumer-facing applications that access Fuel Finder data publishing conflicting or misleading prices. In our opinion these challenges could have been avoided and the manner in which some issues have been addressed is also questionable, where platform updates have been published without retailers and other data users being made aware.”
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which manages the scheme, said: ”we encourage remaining retailers to register now to ensure compliance with this mandatory scheme.”
