Live Fuel Prices Arrive on Google Maps as Diesel Tops £2
From today Google Maps shows live petrol and diesel prices, drawn from the government’s Fuel Finder feed, which forecourts have been legally required to update within thirty minutes of any change since February. Diesel passed £2 a litre for the first time days ago and has since fallen about 2p. Ofcom puts Google Maps in the hands of 77% of British adults.
The timing is not comfortable for the government. Brent crude is up about 3% this morning to $103 after a tanker was hit off Qatar, and diesel is more than 40% dearer than in late February. John Healey framed it as doing what can be done: “Getting the best price at the pump is now easier. This doesn’t fix everything; bills have gone up because of events in the Middle East. But we’re not powerless.” The AA puts a 55-litre diesel tank at about £110 and petrol at about £96, and its president Edmund King calls the change “a massive step forward”. His colleague Luke Bosdet is more interesting on why it might matter: publishing the data could “signal trouble for the fuel trade by revealing the forecourt pricing tactics which keep local prices artificially high in their full horror”. The Competition and Markets Authority warned retailers in August that many were still slow to pass on falls in wholesale diesel. Two caveats are worth carrying. The government’s claim of near-complete coverage is about 99% of fuel sold, not 99% of forecourts, and Clare Lafferty of PetrolPrices says some sites have never registered while others register and then do not update; her firm identified about 200 forecourts in September it believed had not updated diesel prices in time. The saving the scheme was sold on, when it launched in February, was £40 a year.