Proactive Investors - Petrol retailers will have to share information on pump price changes within half an hour of making them to help drivers find the most cost-effective petrol and diesel under the UK's new 'Pumpwatch' scheme.
Motorists paid an extra £900 million due to this issue, according to a probe by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) into the sector, which found evidence of 'rocket and feather' pricing, prices rising fast but falling slowly.
The CMA gathered daily fuel price data from the major forecourt players, which include supermarkets Tesco PLC (LON:TSCO), J Sainsbury (LON:SBRY), Asda and Morrisons, and oil giants Shell PLC (LON:SHEL) and BP PLC (LON:BP), as well as the likes of Esso (LON:0N9V), Texaco and Gulf.
Under the new plan from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, fuel retailers will have a legal obligation to share near-live data with local authorities empowered to enforce compliance through financial penalties.
An aggregator will be appointed to manage the data, which will then be freely accessible to price comparison sites.
In part, the new regulations aim to expose disparities in fuel prices across different regions and even within the same retail chains, with the CMA data showing significant price differences across branches of the same supermarket chain in various locations.
The initiative arrives as the average price of a litre of petrol recently dropped to its lowest level since October 2021, while oil prices are stabilising with Brent crude hovering just under $80 a barrel despite international trade disruptions.
Simon Williams, the RAC's fuel spokesperson, said: “Time is critical now. We need this to happen as quickly as possible. Sadly, there have been far too many occasions where drivers have lost out at the pumps when wholesale prices have fallen significantly and those reductions haven’t been passed on quickly enough or fully enough by retailers.”