Fuel Duty

Ben Lake Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. That is a reminder that people’s experiences of increased prices are myriad in type. What those people have in common is a shared and sudden hardship that forces them to make incredibly difficult decisions—or, indeed, choices if they have choices to make.

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion Preseli) (PC)]

The hon. Member makes an important point about the impact on rural areas. Does he also agree that we should bear in mind the consequences of this price spike on businesses? Many of the businesses in my patch are also off grid. Having gone through the winter period and perhaps hoping for some good fortune in the spring, they are now facing this big barrier. Indeed, some have already told me that they are cutting back on operations and contemplating closure because of this new pressure.

[Tim Farron]

Any effort that the Government make in supporting people and businesses through this process will have a medium to long-term positive impact on the Treasury: if we can keep businesses in business, making a profit and keeping people in work, those companies and employees will be paying tax and refunding much of that investment—so investment it truly is. Our amendment sets out some practical alternatives. It acknowledges the devastating impact of the Government’s decision to increase fuel duty from September, and it calls for that to be cancelled. It focuses also on the experiences of rural and other off-grid communities that have been left exposed by years of under-investment. It specifically calls on the Government to cancel the fuel duty rise, immediately to zero-rate VAT on heating oil, to develop a price cap mechanism for heating oil and other uses of energy, to expand rural fuel duty beyond the relatively small number of places in which it currently operates, and to invest in an emergency upgrade programme, so that we are not so exposed to these things in the future.

I recognise—and welcome to a degree—the Government’s announcement this week on some support for homes and businesses that are reliant on heating oil. I have done my sums and it works out at £35 per household. That is an inadequate sticking plaster. It will not have much of an impact on household finances. What we need is an energy price cap for people who live in rural communities, otherwise they will continue to believe that this Government, and perhaps others before them, do not really care very much about them. They will focus on the energy bills of other people, but not on those of people in rural communities. Therefore, this announcement does not go remotely far enough, although we are happy that the Government have at least begun to talk about the matter.

The impact of the massive price rises in energy costs—motor fuel, car fuel, heating oil and other forms of fuel—is absolutely local. It is house by house, family by family, community by community, business by business. It is bound to be observed that this has been triggered by the actions of one D. Trump in the White House. The war has entered the lives of people in Iran, and the lives of innocent people across the middle east and a range of different countries. It has also had a massive impact on the global economy. As has been said, it all comes down to who controls the strait of Hormuz, which Iran effectively does at the moment. As long as that is true, whatever the President of the United States says, Iran is effectively winning.

In the meantime, fuel prices are rocketing. Quite simply, as the International Energy Agency has noted:

“The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.”

That is quite something. It does not make me an enormous expert in international affairs to conclude that this was all utterly and totally predictable when Donald Trump began this war. As others have mentioned, this is about not just oil, but gas, fertilisers and petrochemicals—crucial inputs, Higher prices and increased scarcity will have a massive impact on our economy more broadly, and on the cost and availability of food production, with the result that, sadly, we can look forward to increased food prices in coming months.

My community is the most visited place—outside London—in the United Kingdom. We are home to a huge tourism economy. Some 60,000 people in Cumbria earn their living in hospitality and tourism, which is already struggling because of the Government’s national insurance rise more than a year ago. We are an economy that very much relies on small businesses. One in four people in the workforce in my constituency works for themself. Smaller businesses, which are much less likely to be able to withstand these shocks, are the backbone of our economy.

I have talked about food prices, and I am bound to mention the impact on our farmers. Let us not forget that by December this year direct payments will be over. So many people in my area, particularly those farming in the uplands of Cumbria, are on incomes that are less than the minimum wage. They seek to look after our environment, our landscape, the backdrop to our tourism economy, and, even more importantly, to feed us. The cost of their production will rise as a consequence of all these events and there will potentially be an impact on our food prices.

I mentioned the rural fuel subsidy earlier, which came about as a consequence of the Liberal Democrats’ time in government, when we were in coalition with our Conservative colleagues. Outrageously, though, it applies to only 21 places in the UK, not one of them in Wales and only one of them in Cumbria—a lovely place called Grizebeck. That means that the Government have a mechanism by which they could help rural communities, and we ask them, at the very least, to double the access and scope of the rural fuel duty subsidy right across the country—including, first and foremost, I am bound to say, in the lakes and dales of Cumbria. Everyone will be hurt by the impact on inflation—reduced demand, inequality and unfairness for those earning the least will potentially be huge.

The Government’s fuel duty rise exacerbates a problem, which has, as I have said, been created in the White House. The United States needs to fix the problem that it created. It cannot be up to others to save it from its failures to think things through. Colin Powell, a person who is perhaps wiser—I think that is fair to say—than the current occupant of the White House, once said to George W Bush that,

“if you break it, you own it”.

That was said of the war in Iraq. Surely the same can be said now to the President of the United States. I gently point out that it applies also to those in the Conservative and Reform Front-Bench teams who egged the President on in the first place.

NATO allies should not be joining Donald Trump in a war that he started without ever consulting his allies or explaining his war aims. He wants us to fall in line meekly, but we must not do so. Donald Trump still cannot articulate his endgame or what victory would look like. He went to war thinking that the Iranian regime would fall quickly—of course, it has not—and that Tehran would not attack the Gulf states or close the strait of Hormuz, which of course was always likely. Why would we align not just with such a moral outrage, but with such epic stupidity? Although I am grateful to the Conservatives for submitting a timely and important motion, we must remember that they are part of the reason that we are in this mess. [Interruption.] I will wrap up, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Meanwhile, against the backdrop of that international situation of extreme danger, my constituent in Kirkby Stephen fills up with diesel that costs 25% more than it did three weeks ago. Her home is cold, because she cannot buy any more heating oil, as it has gone up threefold in the past three weeks. She travels to Windermere to earn the minimum wage, and at the end of the day it is barely worth the bother. Do not tell her that politics does not change things; it really does. Our amendment aims to change things for her for the better.