I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the UK fuel price of late as it was last seen increasing at a rate of up to 0.3p/litre/day.

Unfortunately, my primary data source, the UK AA website stopped updating with the fuel price at 101.2p/litre on Tuesday. The same happened for Petrolprices.com

Petrolprices.com say they use fuel-card user data to compile a daily survey of about 8,000 petrol stations across the country to calculate the average price. It is not immediately clear why the data would suddenly become unavailable. The AA website says that they source data from Catalist Ltd & Arval.

Extrapolating from Tuesday’s data, the current average price of a litre of unleaded could be 101.8p/litre by now.

So, does anyone know of an alternate source for up-to-date fuel price data?

Photo credit: Steevven1

The ONS announced today that the CPI and RPI index measures of inflation have increased from their frankly absurd lows where CPI was just 1.8%

I say absurd because the while the CPI figure was descending, it became clear that fuel, food and basic necessities inflation was rocketing up. It has recently been reported that supermaket price inflation on groceries has been running anywhere between 10 and 16%, this is said to be caused by poor crops and high transportation costs. Of course, the fuel price is going up fast with a barrel of Brent crude costing more than $90US at the end of last week. This has a knock-on effect for energy prices as some powerstations are oil fired.

It has been widely rumored that the items in the CPI basket are regularly manipulated in order to produce a desirable CPI figure. This has lead some to complain that they cannot eat their iPods and that music downloads cause poor performance when used as fuel for their vehicles.

The ONS states that the new CPI figure of 2.1% is off the back of the increasing fuel price. The Retail Price Index is now up to 4.2%

The Bank of England’s only method of control over inflation is to set interest rates which now stand at 5.75% It appears they may need to go higher still to curb inflation.

Worryingly, the fuel price is continuing upwards. Last week I wrote that the AA were reporting the average price of a litre of petrol as having exceeded £1/litre. During last week, the price was increasing at an average of 0.2p/litre/day (and this continued through the weekend). However, into today, the fuel price increased at 0.3p/litre/day which would mean a 2.1p/litre a week increase in the price should this trend continue. The recent and suddenly high price of Brent crude may be yet to filter through to the ‘pump’ so there is potential for the price trend to stay.

This fast increase in the price of fuel is bound to force the reported rate of inflation higher.

Well, it’s official. The AA reports that the average price per litre of petrol within the UK is now 100.1p, the price of a litre of Diesel, a staggering 103.3p.

This is being caused by a combination effort. Firstly, Gordon Brown’s 2p/litre increase in tax pushed the price close to £1 followed by the Turkish intervention with the Kurds in Northern Iraq driving  the price of a barrel of crude over $96.

The next pre-programmed increase in fuel tax in April from the former chancellor should see the UK fuel price pegged firmly in excess of £1/litre in perpetuity

Naturally, the huge and increasing cost of fuel has a knock-on effect and coupled with poor crops this year, the transportation costs of food are now showing up on the Supermarket Shelves. (Supermarket inflation reputedly running at 10-12% on groceries)

£1+ Fuel looks to be here to stay.