Motor Fuel Price (Open Data) Regulations 2025

Earl of Effingham Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Grand Committee

The instrument before us represents an important step in bringing forth real change in market transparency and a progressive step towards a more transparent and fair market. The Government are committed to honouring the promise in the 2024 Budget to restore fairness at the pump and ensure that motorists are no longer disadvantaged by pricing practices. Fuel finder is not just a technical solution but a practical one that puts consumers across the UK at the heart of policy design. By shining a light on pricing practices, fuel finder will increase competition to help bring down fuel prices and ensure that no driver is left overpaying at the pump. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this statutory instrument forward. This was indeed a Conservative initiative, started under the previous Government and designed both to increase competition and to benefit consumers; His Majesty’s loyal Opposition are of course pleased that the current Administration are continuing our work.

The need for this measure was made apparent by the excessive profits earned by major retailers due to a sudden rise in fuel prices in the wake of global supply shocks resulting from the Covid pandemic and Russia’s attack on Ukraine. By 2023, higher fuel margins across the whole market were costing drivers a total of £2.5 billion, £900 million of which went to major supermarket retailers as a result of a 60p per litre hike in fuel prices for consumers.

This instrument aims to create a fairer fuel market. Competition is its aim, and competition is best achieved through the transparency of data and information. Artificially increasing margins becomes materially more challenging when the consumer is no longer on the wrong side of asymmetric information and fully knows that he or she can drive just a few minutes down the road to save money. Being aware of pricing is one part of this, but knowing whether margins are fair and whether their past increases were proportionate is another equally important factor.

Although this instrument requires petrol filling stations to report price changes, it does not extend to reporting on the availability of fuel types. We would be most grateful if the Government could address this issue at pace. It cannot be logical that a driver will be able to see a competitive price but then be disappointed by an empty pump when they arrive at their destination. Is the Minister giving consideration to this? Do the Government accept that an individual using a fuel finder app will indeed be disappointed to arrive at the pump only to find that what they want is not available and will, as a consequence, potentially lose faith in the system?

If it occurs within the Government’s timeframe, the launch of the fuel finder will come two years after the CMA’s recommendation and a year later than originally planned. The Chancellor included the fuel finder in her Budget speech, but she failed to mention that it is a continuation of a Conservative policy and avoided saying that the measure was delayed by her own Government. Instead of the Government delaying for a year then, potentially, blaming complexity for not being able to introduce more thorough transparency measures while protecting low-volume providers, can we please have actions, not words? A potential solution would be to create categories of petrol filling stations and to require major retailers to report in more detail. We must ask: why is this out of the Government’s scope?

We are also concerned about the instrument’s timescale. The Under-Secretary of State for Energy Consumers confirmed that guidance and training would be published before the rollout of the whole programme, but this will come as little reassurance to petrol filling stations. Both stations and providers need time to adapt, prepare and comply with these new regulations. It will do little to help them if the guidance is released as the regulations come into force. That will potentially happen if the Government leave this too late. Additional last-minute costs will be passed on to the consumer, which is precisely what this instrument aims to prevent.

The Under-Secretary of State said that the scheme is to be launched at the year end, but the full provisions of this instrument will come into force only on 2 February next year. Can the Minister please confirm that the guidance will come out before the end of the year, given that the Member in the other place was slightly less clear as to which date the guidance will be published by?

Despite these reservations, His Majesty’s loyal Opposition welcome the introduction of this measure that we initiated. It will provide a more competitive market and drive the rate of price increases down. Our aim should be to create a more certain and more competitive market for the consumer, bringing costs down for hard-working people. We very much hope the Government will take our suggestions on board and action them accordingly.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions and in particular the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for his very constructive contribution. As he rightly points out, this proposal originated with the previous Government but, I think, fell at the time of the general election—it had started to go through the House. The present Government have been able to take that original proposal and have some extensive consultations and discussions with industry and various other key actors in this field to make sure that the fuel finder was as streamlined and as effective as it could be. That is the form in which it comes before us today.

In terms of the regulations coming in in February, the aim is to make sure that this proposal comes in by the end of the year but, as the noble Earl will appreciate, there is a large number of technical issues to resolve in order to meet that date. What I can best say today is that there is an aim to do that by the end of the year and we hope that will be possible. I hope the noble Earl will understand that there is a lot of work to get this in place and we hope that will be finished in time for that target date to be achieved.

When the fuel finder was originally introduced, there was some suggestion that availability at the pumps should be included among the things that petrol stations had to provide. However, following substantial consultation and considerations of the practical challenge of reporting fuel unavailability—officials did conduct a thorough analysis—it was decided to postpone that and remove the requirement from the fuel finder scheme. But, as I have emphasised, that is a question of postponing and removing for the time being.

If a number of those really practical difficulties can be resolved, that might be something for the future as far as the scheme is concerned, but what the Government wanted to do was make sure that we could introduce a practically implementable and early actionable scheme so that we could get this running on an open access data arrangement as soon as was conceivably possible. I do, however, understand the noble Earl’s concerns. I happen to have an electric car, so perhaps I am a little outside the considerations in this instrument, but I know the problems of an electric car owner thinking that they have found an electric charge point only to find that someone else has been using it for the past three hours and they cannot get near it. There are measures in the industry to resolve that sort of problem, so this is something worth looking at for the future.

I emphasise that the first three months of those technicalities will be until early May. The CMA’s emphasis, as the enforcer, will be on supporting businesses to comply with the new regime rather than enforcement, as I have said, so there will be a period coming in to make sure that the scheme works well and that everybody is undertaking it properly. This scheme is well founded—I welcome the support that has been given to it by the noble Earl and the party opposite—and I am sure that, with a good wind from everybody in this place, it can be in place as soon as possible, to the benefit of motorists across the country.