Motoring Discussion > Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? Miscellaneous
Thread Author: SteelSpark Replies: 22
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 08:51 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - SteelSpark
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8569525.stm
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 09:15 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - Statistical Outlier
I paid £1.249 for diesel at Warwick services on Saturday. Needless to say I didn't tank it.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 09:56 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - -
Just out of interest if we pay £1.20 for a litre exactly how much of that goes to the chancelleor to spend as quickly as he can.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 10:20 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - oilburner
From today's prices:

56.91p litre is fuel duty

Then you add the cost of the fuel:

36p litre

(1 US barrel = $80, about £54. There's 159L in a barrel = 33p a litre, plus refining costs of 10%)

Then the cost to retail it:

5p litre

Totals:

97.91p litre

Then add 17.5% VAT:

115p litre. Of which 74p is tax, or 64% of the total cost of fuel.

On the 1st of April (!!!!) another 3p will be added to fuel duty meaning another 3.5p a litre including VAT. After that, the government is planning increasing the duty on fuel by 1% above the rate of inflation annually, i.e. a return to the fuel duty escalator, again.

Add whole sale increases in price of oil, and £1.20 per litre will soon be breached.
Last edited by: oilburner on Tue 16 Mar 10 at 10:21
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 10:29 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - oilburner
p.s. I think it should be obvious from these figures that any talk of greed from oil companies or forecourts is total nonsense, perpetuated by the media through either ignorance or through a political desire to draw attention away from the high levels of taxation.

5p a litre cut to retail the product is nothing when you consider they have to ship the stuff from the various refineries and depots around the country, run a forecourt, pay staff and still make a profit from what's left.

BTW, I don't work for any oil companies or petrol retailers, I'm just making a point...

There's only one indisputably greedy party here, the UK government.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 10:37 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - smokie
"There's only one indisputably greedy party here, the UK government."

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but the govt has to raise revenue somewhere. "We" seem willing to keep on paying the ever increasing prices for the luxury of car ownership, so why would they stop milking it?

btw the oil companies have been somewhat greedy in the past - wasn't there windfall taxes on them a few years back?
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 10:46 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - oilburner
The way I see it, we're not all exactly keen to pay such high fuel costs, hence the move to more efficient cars (partly for VED reasons, and maybe some people care passionately about CO2 emissions too...), but the more efficient the UK fleet of cars gets, the more the taxes go up...

Sure, this tax money needs to be raised somewhere, but it seems to me that fuel duty is highly regressive, affecting the poorest hardest, and that seems unfair.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:04 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - RattleandSmoke
I think this is slowly what is hapening, road tax is slowly being replaced by higher tax on fuels which in some ways I support. For me it actually works out cheaper to pay 10p a litre more for fuel but then save well over £100 on road tax.

For smaller cars VED has gone down and down.

The problem I have with fuel prices when they get this high is when does it stop? It will be £2 a litre by 2012?
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:25 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - ....
>> I think this is slowly what is hapening road tax is slowly being replaced by
>> higher tax on fuels which in some ways I support.
>>
VED will not disappear, it will be rebranded as Vehicle Environment Duty or some other name. Once everyone is in sub 100g/km cars the rate will rise. Count on it.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:28 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - L'escargot
>> Sure this tax money needs to be raised somewhere but it seems to me that
>> fuel duty is highly regressive affecting the poorest hardest and that seems unfair.
>>

Definitely. I just wish we could afford to buy a newer and more fuel-efficient car.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 11:01 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - John H
>> btw the oil companies have been somewhat greedy in the past - wasn't there windfall
>> taxes on them a few years back?
>>

Was that not due to UK exploration rights having been auctioned at a low price based on the world oil market at the time, but then oil prices rose and oil companies made a windfall gain?
I find it difficult to understand how economics work on a local and global scale. Minerals are dug out of the ground. The producer and the country of origin make some money from that. Who creates the new money needed to buy that stuff? The money supply in the country and the world keeps rising. Some nations like the China and India make a gain and lend their surplus savings back to the nations in the West which are running their economies at a deficit.
The money gets spent even by nations who are savers because the money gets lent to the borrowers and it all goes round and round locally and globally. Who ultimately gains and who loses from all this merry go round?
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 10:26 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - Bromptonaut
about 70% iirc. The current figure will be on HMRc's website; another 3p to be added from next month.

(edit - crossed wih oilburner)
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Tue 16 Mar 10 at 10:26
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:02 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - RattleandSmoke
Put it this way I am seeing how long I can run my car on empty for. I am refusing to fill it up because it does 25mpg but its getting very close to empty empty empty now so I may not have much choice. I have certainly been walking more as a direct result of high fuel prices.

I can see some new protests coming on soon
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:12 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - -
Thanks OB for that very clear and comprehensive breakdown of the fuel pricing situation re tax.
I doubt you'll get a job in any government depts of the next (or previous) 20 years, telling the truth as clearly as that wouldn't endear you..;)
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:21 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - oilburner

>> I doubt you'll get a job in any government depts of the next (or previous)
>> 20 years telling the truth as clearly as that wouldn't endear you..;)
>>

Or as a journalist for that matter, given the all too obedient repeating of spin and statistical games without so much of a thought given.

I can't say I'm worried at my loss! :D
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:28 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - -

>> Or as a journalist for that matter
Couldn't agree more.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:39 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - Dave_
>> Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre?

It already has at one garage near me. 120.9p for both petrol and diesel in fact.

My most local station seems to have been raising his prices by 1p/litre a day over the last week, yet the supermarkets are now keeping their prices substantially lower than the mainstream brands.

>> its getting very close to empty empty empty now

Mine too, I've got into a routine lately where I put enough fuel in it to fetch my son at the weekend and then see how far off the bottom of the gauge I can get it through the week! It's rather more depressing when I have to fill it up for a long run, as now £30 doesn't even pay for half a tank :-(
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 12:47 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - RattleandSmoke
Just worked out I have done 97 miles on £20 worth of petrol :( Before the winter last year when I my run of bad luck I had got 70 miles for a £10 in my Corsa.

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 Tue 16 Mar 10 14:45 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - Boxsterboy
I couldn't believe it when a Labour MP blamed 'greedy oil companies' for the rise in fuel prices today. Nothing to do with their increased taxes, oh no, of course not.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 15:08 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - oilburner
I can see his point, oil companies are (generally) amongst the most profitable in the world.

But their profits are broadly comparable to companies like Microsoft, Nestle, Wal Mart etc. Companies who are in a far more predictable and less risky business than oil exploration and production.

I don't hear many people complaining about price gouging at Asda!
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 22:36 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - SteelSpark
>> I can see his point oil companies are (generally) amongst the most profitable in the
>> world.
>>
>> But their profits are broadly comparable to companies like Microsoft Nestle Wal Mart etc. Companies
>> who are in a far more predictable and less risky business than oil exploration and
>> production.

Yes, oil company margins are not massive. For example, Exxon Mobil made $9bn before tax in Q4 2009, but on revenues of about $90bn (so 10%). So, as a percentage, you don't need to cut too far into that margin before they make nothing.

Supermarkets are even worse. In the same period, Wal Mart made $7bn on revenue of $113bn (about 6%).

Microsoft, on the other hand, made $9bn on revenues of $19bn (so almost 50%).

Oil companies may make very large sums of money, but compared to the capital expenditure and risk (as oilburner mentions), they are arguably not excessive, they are just very big companies.
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 Tue 16 Mar 10 22:42 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - SteelSpark
>> I couldn't believe it when a Labour MP blamed 'greedy oil companies' for the rise
>> in fuel prices today. Nothing to do with their increased taxes oh no of course
>> not.

The bad news is that we are now paying for years of Brown's mismanagement of the economy, all those long years when he pretended that he was super chancellor.

The good news is that you will very, very soon get a chance to give him the heave-ho...
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 Wed 17 Mar 10 01:04 
 Petrol to hit £1.20 per litre? - Screwloose

When the VAT rate was cut at the end of '08; petrol/DERV didn't come down, as a balancing 3p/ltr increase in fuel duty was applied.

However; when the VAT was returned to 17.5%, petrol duly went up by 3p/ltr.

Was that clever profiteering as the extra duty was indeed removed; or was the "temporary" extra fuel tax left in place and we've just been played for suckers by HMG - yet again.
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