Posted on by John Sloman

The CMA fuels concerns over high petrol and diesel prices

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been investigating road fuel pricing in the UK. In July 2022, it launched a study into the development of the road-fuel market over recent years. The final report of this study was published in July 2023 and covered the refining, wholesale and retail elements of the market.

In the retail part of the market, the CMA noted some potential causes for concern: retailer fuel margins had increased; there were geographical variations in pricing; filling stations with fewer competitors tended to charge higher prices; retail prices tended to rise rapidly when oil prices increased but fell slowly when oil prices fell (known as ‘rocket and feather’ pricing patterns); motorway service stations charged considerably higher prices than supermarkets or other filling stations.

In response to these findings, the CMA has been publishing an interim report every four months. These reports give average pump prices and margins. They also give relative average pump prices between different types of retailer, and between each of the supermarkets.

The latest interim report was published on 26 July 2024. It reiterated the finding of the 2023 report that the fuel market has become less competitive since 2019. What is more, it continues to be so. In particular, the range of retail prices and the level of retail margins remain high compared to historic levels. The interim report estimates that ‘the increase in retailers’ fuel margins compared to 2019 resulted in increased fuel costs for drivers in 2023 of over £1.6bn’.

Price leadership

Road fuel retailing is an oligopoly, with the major companies being the big supermarkets, the retail arms of oil companies (such as Shell, BP, Esso and Texaco, operating their own filling stations) and a few large specialist companies, such as the Motor Fuel Group (MFG), the EG Group and Rontec, whose filling stations sell one or other of the main brands. But although it is an oligopoly producing a homogeneous product, it is not a cartel (unlike OPEC). Nevertheless, there has been a high degree of tacit collusion in the market with price competition limited to certain rules of behaviour in particular locations. A familiar one is setting prices ending in .9 of a penny (e.g. 142.9p), with the acceptance by competitors that Applegreen will set it ending at .8 of a penny and Asda at .7 of a penny.

One of the main forms of tacit collusion in areas where there are several filling stations is that of price leadership. Asda, and in some areas Morrisons, have been price leaders, setting the lowest price for that area, with other filling stations setting the price at or slightly above that level (e.g. 0.2p, 1.2p or 2.2p higher). Indeed, other major retailers, such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Esso and Shell took a relatively passive approach to pricing, unwilling to undercut Asda and accept lower profit margins.

Things changed after 2019. Asda chose to increase its profit margins. In 2022 it did this by reducing prices more slowly than would previously have been the case as wholesale prices fell. In other words, it used price feathering. Other big retailers might have been expected to use the opportunity to undercut Asda. Instead, they decided to increase their own margins by following a similar pricing path. The result was a 6 pence per litre increase in the average supermarket fuel margin from 2019 to 2022.

More recently, Asda has increased its margins more than other major retailers, making it no longer the price leader. The effect has been to put less pressure on other retailers to trim their now higher profit margins.

Remedies

The 2023 CMA report made two specific recommendations to deal with this rise in profit margins.

The first was that the CMA should be given a statutory monitoring function over the fuel market to ‘hold the industry to account’. In May this year, legislation was passed to this effect. This requires the CMA to monitor the industry and report anti-competitive practice to the government.

The second was to introduce a new statutory ‘open data real-time fuel finder scheme’. This would give motorists access to live, station-by-station fuel prices.

Several major retailers already contribute to a voluntary price data sharing scheme. However, this covers only around 40% of UK forecourts. According to the CMA, it ‘falls well short of the comprehensive, real-time, station-by station data needed to empower motorists and drive competition’. The CMA has thus called on the new Labour government to introduce legislation to make its recommended system compulsory. This, it is hoped, would make the retail fuel market much more competitive by improving consumer information about prices at alternative filling stations in their area.

Articles

CMA reports

Questions

  1. What forms can tacit collusion take?
  2. Why are fuel prices at motorway service stations so much higher than in towns? What is the relevance of the price elasticity of demand to the answer?
  3. What are the main findings of the CMA’s July 2024 Interim Report
  4. What is meant by rocket and feather pricing?
  5. What recommendations does the CMA make for increasing competition in the retail road fuel market?
  6. Find out how competitive retail fuel pricing is in two other developed countries. Why are they more or less competitive than the UK?