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UK fuel suppliers expect crisis to ease soon, as petrol prices rise and disruption continues – as it happened

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A BP petrol station that has run out of fuel is seen in south London, Britain, September 27, 2021.
A BP petrol station that has run out of fuel is seen in south London, Britain, September 27, 2021. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
A BP petrol station that has run out of fuel is seen in south London, Britain, September 27, 2021. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

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Boris Johnson puts army on standby amid fuel supply crisis

And finally....Boris Johnson has ordered the army to remain on standby to help fuel reach petrol stations hit by panic buying, as Keir Starmer and businesses called on him to get a grip on the shortages rippling across the economy.

No 10 said army drivers would be ready to help deliver petrol and diesel on a short-term basis, but stopped short of an immediate deployment, even though some essential workers have not been able to carry out their jobs without fuel.

The decision was taken at a meeting of cabinet ministers on Monday, as the industry said consumer panic – rather than real shortages – was the main driver of the problems, and predicted that it would ease within days.

People continued to queue at fuel stations in spite of government warnings that drivers trying to top up were making the situation worse.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, said it was right for the government to take “sensible, precautionary steps”.

“The UK continues to have strong supplies of fuel. However, we are aware of supply chain issues at fuel station forecourts and are taking steps to ease these as a matter of priority,.

“If required, the deployment of military personnel will provide the supply chain with additional capacity as a temporary measure to help ease pressures caused by spikes in localised demand for fuel.”

The government also authorised an extension to licences for fuel tankers, automatically renewing them without refresher training.

Here’s the full story:

Goodnight! GW

What the papers say....

More front pages....

Tomorrow’s Guardian splashes on Olaf Scholz’s warning that the end to freedom of movement helped caused the UK fuel crisis:

Tomorrow's @Guardian: Brexit to blame for UK’s fuel crisis, says frontrunner to succeed Merkel

• Read our story, by @danielboffey, @rowenamason and @GuardianHeather, here: https://t.co/koPxMH3aKG#TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/ciWkZ68cjH

— Richard Preston (@richardpreston_) September 27, 2021

The Daily Telegraph says critical workers would be given exclusive access to certain petrol stations to ease the fuel crisis under an emergency government plan.

The national emergency plan for fuel grants key workers “priority access” to pumps and caps the amount drivers can spend on fuel.

📰The front page of tomorrow's Daily Telegraph:

'Priority at pumps for key workers in plan to ease crisis'#TomorrowsPapersToday

Sign up for the Front Page newsletterhttps://t.co/x8AV4O6L2Y pic.twitter.com/LgbpyNPZkm

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 27, 2021

This issue also makes the front of The Times:

THE TIMES: Let Britain’s key workers fill up first, PM urged #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/9iVxeJleBC

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) September 27, 2021

The i’s front page flags plans to train military tanker drivers in case they are needed to help with the fuel crisis:

The Yorkshire Post focuses on today’s calls for motorists to stop panic buying:

YORKSHIRE POST: Ministers and fuel firms in plea to stop panic-buying #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/9CiV344caH

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) September 27, 2021

While the Daily Mail leads on a different transport story - failings on the UK’s smart motorways.

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Key workers have spoken about the impact the situation was having on them and their work.

Rosie, a private carer from rural Norfolk, has already had to stop seeing some clients she visits owing to her nearly empty tank.

“I have been unable to get fuel, I have about a quarter of a tank left,” she said.

“I’ve had to prioritise clients to whom I live closest, and those most vulnerable. Those with family members nearby, I’ve told them I’m probably not going to be able to see them. I think I can get through to Wednesday, then I’m completely stuck.”

She said the fuel shortage was potentially worse for those living in rural areas where there is no public transport worth mentioning.

“My nearest petrol station is miles away, so I have to use fuel to go hunting for more fuel. This situation has a big impact on people here. Care agencies are not prepared to cater for some of the remote areas I service.”

It’s also been a dramatic day in the gas markets, where prices continue to soar - putting more pressure on businesses and ultimately consumers.

UK and Dutch natural gas prices closed at new record highs, extending their recent surge:

NATURAL GAS MARKET: Both UK NBP and Dutch TTF natural gas benchmarks have closed the day at their **highest ever settlement level**, up ~11% on the day (to a closing price equal to more than $26 per mBtu). pic.twitter.com/k8YyFmMdo4

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) September 27, 2021

And in America, natural gas futures soared 11% to a seven-year high on Monday as record global gas prices kept demand for U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports strong.

“Spectacular prices around the world are feeding into the sentiment here,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital LLC in New York, adding:

“gas as a commodity is getting repriced....now that we’ve hit these price heights, it will be easy to do it again.”

And on the other side of the Atlantic, U.S. benchmark natural prices jump >10% on the day to a fresh 7-year high of ~$5.7 per mBtu.

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) September 27, 2021

The fuel crisis threatens major disruption to UK essential services and industry, the Financial Times writes tonight, following calls for key workers to get priority access to petrol and diesel.

Here’s a flavour:

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association’s ruling council, said healthcare workers needed access to fuel “whether this is to get to hospitals, practices and other healthcare settings, or for ambulances to reach people in urgent need of care”.

He added that “as pumps run dry there is a real risk that NHS staff won’t be able to do their jobs . . . healthcare and essential workers must therefore be given priority access to fuel”.

Christina McAnea, general secretary of Unison, the UK’s largest public sector union, called for the government to use “emergency powers to designate fuel stations for the sole use of key workers” including medical staff, teachers and police.

David Brown, chair of National Courier and Despatch Association, a trade body, said delivery companies were turning down jobs and telling workers to stay at home because of a lack of certainty around fuel supplies. “It has been difficult,” he added. “It has been frustrating for people who earn a living from driving.”

Liam Griffin, chief executive of Addison Lee, which runs a fleet of 4,000 cars in central London for courier and taxi services, said it was facing increasing “challenges”.

More here: UK fuel crisis threatens to hit essential services and industry

If you can’t get fuel the wheels might not quite come off immediately, but they soon stop turning

UK fuel crisis threatens to hit essential services and industry https://t.co/3jBhq9FahN pic.twitter.com/olrzOavC6g

— David Sheppard (@OilSheppard) September 27, 2021

If you can’t get fuel the wheels might not quite come off immediately, but they soon stop turning

UK fuel crisis threatens to hit essential services and industry https://t.co/3jBhq9FahN pic.twitter.com/olrzOavC6g

— David Sheppard (@OilSheppard) September 27, 2021

Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff has written about the uncertainty and unpredictability created by the fuel crisis, as the UK heads towards a “jittery, anxious winter”:

On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.

The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.

The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)

Here’s the full piece:

Full story: End to freedom of movement behind UK fuel crisis, says Merkel’s likely successor

The centre-left politician in pole position to replace Angela Merkel as German chancellor has pinpointed the decision to end freedom of movement with Europe after Brexit as the reason for Britain’s petrol crisis.

Olaf Scholz, who is seeking to form a coalition government after the SPD emerged as the biggest party in Germany’s federal elections, said he hoped Boris Johnson would be able to deal with the consequences of the UK’s exit from the EU.

“The free movement of labour is part of the European Union, and we worked very hard to convince the British not to leave the union,” he said.

“Now they decided different, and I hope that they will manage the problems coming from that, because I think it is constantly an important idea for all of us to make it happen that there will be good relations between the EU and the UK, but this is a problem to be solved.”

Evening summary

Time to recap...

The UK fuel industry has insisted that the panic buying crisis that has hit forecourts across the country should ease soon.

After several days of chaos at the pump, refiners and distributors predicted that demand will return to normal

The group, including Shell, BP and Esso, said:

There is plenty of fuel at UK refineries and terminals, and as an industry we are working closely with the government to help ensure fuel is available to be delivered to stations across the country.

“As many cars are now holding more fuel than usual, we expect that demand will return to its normal levels in the coming days, easing pressures on fuel station forecourts.

We would encourage everyone to buy fuel as they usually would. “We remain enormously grateful to all forecourt staff and HGV drivers for working tirelessly to maintain supplies during this time.

Environment secretary George Eustice also urged people to buy petrol as normal (although many have found they couldn’t buy fuel at all!), saying that there is no shortage of fuel in the UK.

However, distributors are struggling to get enough fuel to petrol stations -- there have again been many scenes of forecourts closed, or lengthy queues where petrol is on offer, leading to transport disruption through the day.

One petrol station worker said it had been an ‘unprecedented’ time.

Yasser Ahmed, 37, who runs West Drayton service station with his father, said he had “not had time to breathe” as people clamoured to fill up their tanks.

He told the PA news agency.

“We had a delivery Friday morning.

Driving in that’s when it started hitting me there was a lot of talk on the radio (about) panic-buying.

“When I got into work it was considerably busy but not too bad. By the afternoon, when my dad left, I was non-stop, didn’t have time to breathe.

“If there was a spillage outside, it’s a single-man operation, I was having to hold everyone, clear the spillage then rush back in. I couldn’t even sit down.”

The Petrol Retailers Association, a trade body, said the majority of service stations were without petrol and diesel on Monday, with members reporting between 50% and 90% of independent sites had been drained dry by weekend panic buying.

PRA chairman Brian Madderson said the situation was quite acute, and could take several days to fix:

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it’ll be less of a problem by the end of this week.

The government has so far resisted deploying the army to drive fuel tankers, and appears to be pinning its hopes on the crisis easing once more cars have been filled up.

Eustice said there were ‘no plans at the moment’ to put soldiers behind the wheel, although MoD staff have been helping to speed up training sessions.

'We've no plans at the moment to bring in the army to actually do driving'

Environment Secretary George Eustice says the MoD is helping train HGV drivers to resolve petrol distribution issues but soldiers are not expected to be driving lorries themselves https://t.co/wKhzaiG932 pic.twitter.com/Y7D53uijV2

— ITV News Politics (@ITVNewsPolitics) September 27, 2021

Senior ministers have agreed to ask the Army to prepare for getting hundreds of soldiers driving fuel tankers, in case such a dramatic step is needed.

After senior ministers met today to discuss activating Operation Escalin, agreement was they will ask Army to prepare for getting hundreds of soldiers driving fuel tankers - in the event govt decides they’re needed.

— Aubrey Allegretti (@breeallegretti) September 27, 2021

The government also suspended competition laws last night, to help oil companies work together to address the crisis.

But the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said the government should deploy the army’s logistical skills as soon as possible, to help reassure people there wasn’t a fuel crisis.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has called for essential workers such as ambulance drivers and healthcare staff to get priority access to fuel.

Public services in Surrey are considering declaring a major incident in response to the fuel supply crisis.

Schools are hoping that they won’t need to return to online lessons.

The political row over the panic buying continued, with the Road Haulage Association rejecting claims that it had leaked BP’s warning of supply problems:

Motorists are also being hit in the pocket, with fuel prices rising over the weekend....and further rises possible, as crude oil has hit a three-year high today (Brent crude traded as high as $79.90 per barrel)

The RAC also reported an increase in motorists running out of fuel over the weekend....

...while hundreds of panicking motorists filled their tanks with the wrong kind of fuel over the weekend, adding to disruption.

The AA said it had attended 250 misfuelling incidents over the weekend compared with an average of 20-25 on an average day.

The UK was also warned that Brexit had caused its current supply chain problems.

Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic Party’s candidate for German chancellor, said:

The free movement of labor is part of the European Union,.

We worked very hard to convince the British not to leave the union. Now they decided different and I hope they will manage the problems coming from that.”

"Free movement of labour is part of the European Union, and we worked very hard to convince the British not to leave"

Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democrats narrowly won the German election, is asked if he would send truck drivers to the U.K.

More: https://t.co/Xv8rCqR1bn pic.twitter.com/CJLFd4iKxU

— Bloomberg UK (@BloombergUK) September 27, 2021

Edwin Atema, head of research and enforcement at the Federation of Dutch Trade Unions, also warned that the plan to give 5,000 temporary visas may not work.

He gave Radio 4 listeners an early morning jolt by declaring:

The EU workers we speak to will not go to the UK for a short-term visa to help the UK out of the shit they created themselves.

This is what a Dutch HGV driver, and representative of an EU drivers’ union thinks of the short term visa scheme: “The EU workers we speak to will not go back to the UK for a short term visa, to help UK out of the s**t they created themselves.” ~AA pic.twitter.com/P3uaddBFXP

— Best for Britain (@BestForBritain) September 27, 2021
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Phillip Inman
Phillip Inman

The inflationary pressures building in the UK has made a rise in interest rates next year more likely, the central bank chief has warned.

Against a backdrop of rising fuel prices and the prospect of higher transport costs pushing up the price of food in the run-up to Christmas, the Bank of England’s governor said there were signs that inflation could be sustained and the central bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) may need to increase borrowing costs in 2022. More here

Headteachers are hoping that the fuel shortages won’t force a return to online lessons.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said schools were hoping that staff and pupils will still be able to reach the classroom:

“Schools and colleges are operating under a great deal of pressure at the moment because of the situation with Covid infections.

“The last thing they need is the added pressure of fuel shortages with the potential for this to mean that staff, pupils and suppliers are unable to get to school.

“We very much hope the situation is resolved rapidly before it causes disruption.

“There is the option for remote education, which schools and colleges have shown themselves to be very adept at providing through the pandemic, but this is very much a last resort and they will be hoping it doesn’t come to that.”

Full story: Petrol station chaos worsened by motorists filling up with wrong fuel

Gwyn Topham
Gwyn Topham

The chaos on Great Britain’s petrol station forecourts has been worsened by hundreds of panicking motorists filling their tanks with the wrong kind of fuel, breakdown services have reported.

With queues snaking hundreds of metres from some filling stations – and tension building between motorists in places, more than five times as many people as usual in the UK have mistakenly put diesel in their petrol engine or vice versa.

Misfuelling can cause significant damage to cars, and motorists are advised to not switch on the ignition at all once they realise their mistake – meaning such breakdowns potentially block the already crowded forecourts. Hapless drivers also need to have their tanks fully drained while the contaminated fuel has to be jettisoned.

The AA said it had attended 250 such incidents over the weekend compared with an average of 20-25 on an average day. The breakdown company has a fleet of specialist “fuel assist” vans to deal with this type of incident. Should the driver not immediately notice their mistake, large amounts of smoke can come from the exhaust, and the engine is apt to misfire and cut out. Using petrol in a diesel car is the more serious mistake in terms of possible damage.

Here’s the argument for the crisis easing in the coming days....

Prob obvious but worth saying that some of biggest petrol retailers in UK have told me they expect the crisis to ease as - unlike food - you can't continue to buy - once your tank is full its full so there should be a natural fall off in demand in next few days

— Simon Jack (@BBCSimonJack) September 27, 2021

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