Fury road: How soaring fuel prices are causing chaos in Britain

When Jenni Hannant’s boiler packed up, she tried the usual trick to get it going again: banging the pump, pressing the red button and expecting it to kick back in. When it still wouldn’t start, and she called a plumber for advice, they told her to check the oil tank that powers her Norfolk home.

Outside, the padlock was hanging broken and all that remained from the 500 litres she’d filled it with a fortnight previously was a layer of sludge at the bottom. “I’ve never had oil stolen before,” she says. “Now it will probably be stolen to order.”

Numerous neighbours have reported their tanks being drained by oil bandits, adds Hannant, who spent £600 replacing what was taken. She wants to install CCTV to prevent a second attack but, living alone and shouldering the burgeoning cost of living across fuel, food and so much more, that’s not an option.

Britain is suffering its worst oil crisis in years – affecting millions in need of heating their homes, powering cars and cooking en masse. The war in Ukraine has pushed petrol and diesel above £1.60 and £1.70 a litre. This volatility looks set to last. The Mad Max series of films, in which Mel Gibson – and more recently Tom Hardy – played warriors in a resource-starved post-apocalyptic desert landscape, were inspired by the fuel crisis of the Seventies: in 2022, that looks less fiction than reality.

As the price goes up, crime has followed: according to reports from the British Oil Security Syndicate, incidents of “bilking” – the practice of driving off from a forecourt without paying – are up more than 200 per cent on this time last year. Organised criminals are becoming ever more ingenious, motivated by higher sums on the black market; with special pumps, thieves can drain a lorry in minutes. Fake numberplates and GPS scramblers help them to avoid detection. At a haulage depot in Newcastle upon Tyne, thieves used a pipe to siphon £25,000 worth of fuel and transport it to a lorry waiting half a mile away; at a Co-Op in Tyne & Wear, a thief filled up a wheelie bin with unleaded and simply walked off.

It’s not just petrol. As much as a fifth of cooking oil produced in the UK is now stolen, with “chip shop fuel” – where petrol tanks are filled with cooking oil, in lieu of unleaded – a growing goldmine for thieves. Pubs, takeaways, hotels and restaurants across the UK have reported having hundreds of litres taken. This theft causes individual businesses’ prices to spiral, as they rely on trading the waste oil for fresh oil – the price of which is worked out from the return of the used product (which they use to make biofuel). Authorities are trying different tactics to bring oil bandits to task; in Nottinghamshire, police used drones and a decoy truck to catch two teenagers trying to steal a tank full of petrol, while a new app, SafePark, helps drivers report fuel crimes. Still, as prices show no signs of slowing, the crime rate isn’t likely to either.

Luke Bosket from the AA says that while the wholesale oil price has steadied from its peak a few weeks ago, the saving is not being passed onto consumers. “Pre-pandemic, two supermarkets were very competitive on fuel... that would be a signal for the others to follow suit. That’s not happening any more.”

Confronted by exorbitant costs at the pumps, many have been left rewriting their daily routines. Richard Palin, a professor at Oxford University, is among the one in five car users currently cutting back on use, resorting to periods of home-working each week instead of driving to his office. Living 20 miles from Oxford was intended as a cost-effective option for his young family, yet rising petrol bills on top of “everything else going on simultaneously – energy prices, inflation in general –just [means it has] become quite unaffordable for me to take the car.” He is spending around £120 more per month on fuel; his weekly shop is getting “smaller and smaller”. And working from home is no panacea either, with consumers left with a choice of paying extra to drive to work or to light and heat their homes when working there.

Elsewhere, reports abound that driving children to playdates or activities is becoming untenable, and home delivery services are being hit. On Friday, JustEat delivery drivers went on strike in Worcester, railing that the fees they receive are now far below their costs. The £20.6 billion food delivery industry – boosted significantly by the pandemic – is not alone in feeling the strain: in the US, where oil prices have seen a similar spike, delivery company DoorDash is now refunding drivers 10 per cent of their fuel purchases. Uber is doing similar, adding 34p to each food delivery and 42p to each taxi ride, to offset higher prices at the pumps.

There is also a concern that E10, the standard grade of unleaded petrol in Britain since September, is less efficient than its predecessors, meaning we have to fill up faster than before; its environmental credentials (it contains up to 10 per cent bioethanol, distilled from plant material) perhaps being championed at the expense of consumers’ wallets.

These costs do not only hit drivers, of course. The 1.5 million rural British homeowners relying on oil-power have seen costs treble – and even finding companies to deliver has become a major struggle. Minus the comparative luxury of Ofgem’s price cap (afforded only to those on the mains grid), the domestic heating oil industry is now subject to cost fluctuations so extreme, many customers are being contacted on the day of their scheduled delivery with what they’re expected to pay. For some, that’s been a hike from around £250 for a 500 litre delivery to as much as £875.

In Denbighshire, north Wales, the theft of almost 500 litres of oil more than a fortnight ago has left Hollie Hamilton “hypothermic at times”. She has finally secured a delivery and, with it, 24 hours’ warning for a bill that has almost trebled in cost – £593 for 500 litre, compared to £240 less than six months ago.

Fuel crises have often marked significant moments in British political history, from fuel minister Emanuel Shinwell receiving death threats after the 1946-47 fallout, when a cold winter coincided with coal supply problems, to the Suez crisis, causing temporary petrol rationing in 1956. In 1973, the Arab Opec nations refused to sell oil to countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur war, causing prices to rise more than 300 per cent: there were queues and even fights at the pumps, and plans were drawn up to reintroduce rationing. In Britain, the problems were exacerbated by coal miners going on strike and this combination of factors contributed to Edward Heath’s defeat to Harold Wilson in the 1974 general election.

The current situation is perhaps most similar to the 1979 oil shock, when the Iranian Revolution – and subsequently the Iran-Iraq war – affected international oil prices until the mid-Eighties. The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on energy policy might turn out to be even more far-reaching. While refugees flock across Poland’s eastern border from Ukraine, Germans have been crossing the opposite border, into Poland, to fill their tanks more cheaply. Protests over prices have popped up in Spain, France and Germany – and there’s no signs of it slowing.

Many motorists are hoping that Rishi Sunak will announce a 5p per litre cut on fuel duty in his spring statement. While Bosket at the AA says that would be “very, very welcome”, it would only represent a saving of £3.30 on the average 55-litre tank of fuel.

Petrol stations “realise the pressure high prices put on household budgets”, says Gordon Balmer, the chief executive of the Petrol Retailers Association. “But they can’t do it for nothing. Oil is an internationally traded commodity, and we’re subject to supply and demand, and ultimately that has to be reflected in the price you pay.”

Although Britain has battled fuel shocks before, this time the sudden price increase has been at least partly self-imposed. The West has decided not to buy oil from Russia as leverage against Vladimir Putin’s aggression. But the desperation at the pumps and rising levels of fuel-related crime are a stark reminder that when the cost of petrol rises, so does the cost of everything else.