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Updated: 07/10/2012 11:07 | By motoringresearch.com
UK fuel sales in 500 million litre plunge
British motorists cut back on fuel spend at the pumps
Forecourt fuel sales have fallen by more than 10 per cent during the last quarter as buyers cut back on expenditure and cars become more fuel efficient.
Fuel prices – everything you need to know
Petrol sales rise 45% as motorists top up
The Department of Energy and Climate Change reports that nearly 500 million litres less fuel was sold on forecourts compared to the same three-month period between April and June last year.
Compared to 2008, fuel sales were down in the first half of this year by well over two BILLION litres.
That’s despite a rise in fuel sales in the preceding three-month period of around 120 million litres, once caused by motorists panic-buying due to the threatened fuel tanker driver strike.
AA President Edmund King described the latest decline in fuel sales as a ‘huge drop’.
“While we welcome the fact that new cars have become more fuel-efficient, this goes nowhere near to accounting for the crash in demand over the past three months and the past five years.
“A fall of 2.27 billion litres in UK fuel sales over the first six months of this year compared to the same period in 2008 has got to bring some sense of reality to the fuel market and the Government.”
King said the fuel industry was guilty of “trying to squeeze more money out of shrinking customer demand” and called for greater price transparency at the fuel pumps “to ensure and show drivers that they are getting a fair deal at the pump.”
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13Comments
04/10/2012 15:25
The 'PRICE' of fuel is mostly TAXATION - put another way, without tax you are talking around 60p a litre for DIESEL! So the oil companies extricate the stuff from under the sea or desert, ship it half way around the world, refine it, take it by road tanker to the petrol stations, who then sell it to us. Everybody in the supply chain, from guys at the the well head, the chef on the Supertanker, the docker at the refinery, the tanker driver transporting it and the electric company, supply power to the petrol station, ALL GET PAID out of this 60p, AND the Oil Company make a decent profit and pay their shareholders a decent Dividend on their shares! 60 bloody P!
Our wonderful Government add ONE HUNDRED & FIFTY% to this!!! 150%! (Do the Math) For which we get what? It helps pay for various wars, and the military personnel who get killed/maimed in them, we pay our subs to the EU (we are net contributors to the EU - we pay in more than we get out) The salaries and pensions of 'the great and the good' (yes, sarcasm) at Westminster.....and WE get our bloody BINS emptied' 'Bi- weekly', or once a fortnight, in the real world.
If anyone from one of the great Dictionaries needs a modern definition for 'Rip-Off', you've just found it!
When we use the car these days, we try and drop the Dry cleaning in, go to the S/Market, put flowers on graves and any other 'jobs' we can squeeze in. More 'Jobs per Gallon'! and no wonder.
When I started driving, you used to go for a drive at the weekends, see friends or places. That seems light years away now.
Sorry for the 'Bloodies', but I HATE being ripped off, and know I'm being!
03/10/2012 19:54
Surprise, surprise.
My annual mileage has dropped from 12K a year in 2010 to what will probably be about 4K in 2012. I now order everything I can online and do most of my work from home.
So who is the big loser in all this? All of us. My total outgoings are also way down because I don't shop as much or go out as much so local businesses suffer. Things I might have picked up by dropping into the nearest town in my economical little car while doing other shopping now get delivered by diesel-guzzling vans and trucks so the environment suffers. I can't (as the government want us to) use public transport because where I live we don't have any so there's no trade off there.
Dumb, dumb and dumber!!!!! It's known as pricing yourself out of the market.
03/10/2012 14:44
Its hardly surprising that sales are dropping off, this high cost is pure greed by the government and the oil companies and its wrong to expect the motorist to have to pay it in difficult times.
04/10/2012 22:27
To beat this ridiculous price of fuel i have decided to buy an upmarket Jaguar, get a chauffeur to run me about and charge it all to the taxpayer. All i need to do is become a government minister, sounds easy enough, lets face it if Cameron/Osborne can, it must be simple.
04/10/2012 10:43
Having a return journey now of just short of 60 miles imposed on me by my employer relocating us further away from the original location of 42 miles I signed up for I now I find I stop and do all my shopping near where I work on the way home so my local shop's and town centre are loosing out on my business... when will the government realise that people only have a finite amount to spend on fuel and spending more on it means you eat less or go out less so the economy suffers in all direction's.
03/10/2012 15:17
No doubt someone in government will read this and increase fuel tax to compensate for tax lost ...............
24/02/2013 23:07
With the government taking around £1 per litre in tax the reduced sales must mean a £500 million loss to them. Any economist will tell you that when sales fall you HAVE to reduce prices to increase sales. But then the government aren't economists, they are self preservationists.
03/10/2012 16:12
Transparency to show that were getting a fair deal? I seriously doubt making the prices transparent will help increase sales as people will just see how much there being ripped off by the fuel companies even more than they do now.
03/10/2012 10:15
Can't say I'm surprised. Perhaps motorists are waking up to the fact that unnecessary journeys are becoming very expensive, or they're choosing other ways of getting around.
In my own case, my car has done just under 4000 miles in a year and is only used when there are at least two people in the car. If the journey warrants it, I use public transport or if it's just locally, I walk.
I know some people can't go the length of themselves without a car but if they decided to be more thrifty, just imagine the drop in fuel use that would result. It might even benefit their health.
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