Fuel price wars hot up in UK

In a summer of complete and utter discontent – just try looking out of the window, filling up your car, repaying your mortgage, affording your electricity/gas/water/bread/etc whilst maintaining a measure of jocularity – and with the odds of even the remotest sense of pleasure stacked heavily against us, it’s fallen to the nation’s supermarkets to jolly us all up a bit.

With Asda having started the annual supermarket summer fuel face off a few weeks back – only to be joined by the likes of Morrison’s, Tesco and Sainsbury’s – it’s once more time to see who’s cutting how many pennies, when, where and how.

This time round it’s Morrison’s taking the bull by the horns and slashing two pence off the price of a litre of both diesel and unleaded as from 6am this very morning. Of its 285 forecourts nationally, the UK’s fourth largest supermarket will now be averaging 109.9p per litre for unleaded fuel, whilst its diesel will retail for 121.2p. Which might just give some of us UK motorists a glimmer of seasonal cheer.

The supermarkets are showing all petroleum retailers the way as a direct result of the price for a barrel of crude oil having taken another monthly bashing, this time seeing 30 US Dollars wiped off its previous value. This itself has urged some analysts to suggest that the onset of a worldwide recession is behind a reduced global demand for oil.

Although pleased that the possibility of another huge, grey cloud might have exposed a glint of silver, this latest price war has only further highlighted to many critics the discrepancies between what British drivers and their European counterparts pay at the pumps.

This is in light of the latest fuel-related research that shows that as UK drivers were splashing out 119p per litre on four star petrol in July, Spanish motorists were getting away with paying 96p for the equivalent fuel.

Elsewhere, and Germany, France and Italy were all found to be cheaper on average last month as we struggled to fill up our tanks. Spain again taking just £1 a litre off their drivers for diesel, while Brits were forking out 133p for the same.

Morrison’s has calculated that its customers will now be paying £5 less when filling their tanks to the gunnels, when compared to three weeks back, maintaining that when the price of crude falls, they will pass these savings on to their customers.

Tesco has come out fighting, urging that it will cut its fuel prices so as to match the best prices offered by any retailer in that particular area, and Asda is equally adamant that it will become even more competitive, concluding that it too would cut prices from tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, the effects of which would see unleaded fall to 109.9p, and diesel 121.9p across the country.