I think there’s some kind of priority given to motorway service stations as they can’t have lots of people running out of fuel on a motorway.

I believe the Gov or whomever, has said that motorway service stations will be prioritised for fuel deliveries.

However I wonder if they’ll have to drive around in something like this to get the fuel through 😂

Massive queues at the one near my house last night. But they presumably had fuel or they’d have closed.

I believe the Gov or whomever, has said that motorway service stations will be prioritised for fuel deliveries.

They will be and the diesel will be prioritised for HGV’s and emergency vehicles if it gets to that stage. There are lots of haulage companies that use a particular brand and don’t have a tank at their yard so they rely on the services to keep running.

Esso in the middle of Letchworth was rammed with queues of 3-5 outside both entrances at 6.50am this morning

Just passed again, midday, and it’s the exact same

How long before we see an increase in thefts of red diesel from farms?

3 days of panick buying, surely every car in the uk is full ?

How long before we see an increase in thefts of red diesel from farms?

Well, some of the farmers around here have been openly offering it for sale on the local Friendface groups

Well, some of the farmers around here have been openly offering it for sale on the local Friendface groups

Buccaneering Brexit Spirit innit. Just a bit of free enterprise.

Highly illegal for them to sell red diesel unless authorised.

Just nipped out to the shops to get some cleaning stuff for the oven (lovely job…) and couldn’t get into the local Morrisons or Tesco as they were rammed for the petrol stations! Had to slum it and go to Sainsbury’s as they closed their petrol station on Saturday and haven’t reopened but it meant you couldn’t least get in the car park.

3 days of panick buying, surely every car in the uk is full ?

Mine is down to 1/4 of a tank, roughly 150 miles worth. Haven’t filled up for 5 days but I did brim my mum’s car last night. That was in Brecon and there wasn’t any queues or restrictions, totally different to anywhere else! It really is complete moronic madness now, well beyond panic-buying.

Oh , has everyone noticed that it’s only queues for the supermarkets? The independent station 100 yds down the road has fuel but is dead, must be the extra 4p a litre!

I think there’s some kind of priority given to motorway service stations as they can’t have lots of people running out of fuel on a motorway.

They’ve also hiked their prices. I know motorways are routinely 10-15p/l more than urban garages but some are up at nearly 159.9p/l now. Diesel at my local garage (assuming there’s some actually there, not seen it recently…) is still at 137.9p/l

Highly illegal for them to sell red diesel unless authorised.

Said in a clipped, nasal voice. 😂

Highly illegal for them to sell red diesel unless authorised.

You’d have to be extremely dumb to actually get caught and the police won’t have the time or resources to actually go after this. They probably can’t get there for lack of fuel anyway…

🇬🇧🍆💦🇬🇧

But this is down to Brexit.

nah, down to the moronic public with their FOMO.

You’d have to be extremely dumb to actually get caught and the police won’t have the time or resources to actually go after this. They probably can’t get there for lack of fuel anyway…

Customs and Excise job innit ? If you suspect someone of selling or using then they are the ones who deal with it, not the po po

Just wantonly wasted half a litre test driving my car after fixing it. On the way out there was a huge queue at the nearby Asda blocking access to the entire area. On the way back I passed a village station about a mile out of Cardiff with its lights on but no cars even in it. The queue at Asda had shrunk to the point I could get home but not into the store. I made do with what was in the fridge for lunch.

BaronVonP7
Free Member

Lemme ged this roight: According to Grant Shapps, this be all the fault of “a road haulage association” and a leaked briefing?

The Telegraph trailed this in an online-only story on thursday or friday, “BP deliberately causes petrol shortages to try and force government into giving them back cheap foreign drivers”. And the Road Haulage Association are the people that have been warning the government about the driver shortage for a decade so of course they’re ripe for attack. And of course The Media. Between the three of these evil organisations conspiring together, what could the government possibly hope to have done?

And people are lapping it up. Same as whenever a supermarket announces shortages, they always have an agenda. Apparently that agenda is “literally telling customers that they might not be able to get what they want from our supermarket”, which seems a bit odd but it makes sense to brexiteers and tory fanboys.

nah, down to the moronic public with their FOMO.

I also think part of the problem is when you have a puppet government minister (Kwasi Kwarteng) telling you nothing to see here do not panic buy it makes probably quite a few people think right get the car filled up. A large majority of the UK treat everything the government says as a lie unless evidence shows it’s not.

3 days of panic buying, surely every car in the uk is full ?

Some sort of Petrol Industry Bod on the radio this morning was basically saying this, they’re hoping for a few days of normality to let them catch up, and reiterating there’s no lack of fuel, just drivers to bring it to stations and if we keeping buying it all, it’ll run out.

There’s still a lot of people out there with too much time on their hands driving from station to station to squeeze in a few more quids worth of unleaded, but hopefully they’re a minority, and by the weekend it’ll all have blown over. If it’s not what’s the old saying? A person can be intelligent but people are stupid? Something like that? Anyway, there’s no point trying to swim against the tide, I was queuing for Diesel myself at the weekend if I had a weeks worth in my car, I’d have been happy to bide my time, but I didn’t, the light came on so I filled it to the top, which in fairness I usually do at this time of month. I’m hoping it’ll be long forgotten in 2 weeks when I need some more, but if it’s not in a week, I might be tempted to fill up again ‘just in case’. Is that ‘panic buying’ well yes, but there’s a very real chance it’ll run out, it’s an 60 min walk from home to my Daughters school, or a 30 min cycle that’s really not practical for a 7 year old twice a day, and whilst I can cycle to work, I can’t if I can’t get my daughter to school.

3 days of panick buying, surely every car in the uk is full ?

this gives the lie to the Govs defence that its the public buying too much fuel rather than any issue with supply. People can’t generally hoard fuel like they can pasta or toilet roll. Save for topping up their 5ltr jerry can (which if they own one probably already has fuel in it) most people aren’t in the position to buy more fuel than normal –  the most they can do is fill the tank a little sooner than they normally would – which in most instances really means buying less fuel than they normally would because they already have fuel in the tank – so any that  are ‘panic buying’  can only buy less than they normally would a few days sooner than they normally would.  That would explain a queue but it doesnt really explain a shortage. Especially as there was an evident shortage before it was even news I had to pass two forecourts that had closed their pumps last Monday.

this gives the lie to the Govs defence that its the public buying too much fuel rather than any issue with supply.

I think the whole country now reacts in the same way to any assurances given by this bunch of muppets

But this is down to Brexit.

nah, down to the moronic public with their FOMO.

Bit of both really, the root cause is a lack of Lorry drivers, and tanker driving is a specialist role in haulage so there are even fewer drivers.

From what I can read on it, Lorry Driving is frankly, a crap job. Pre-shortage it was paying around £13-£15 an hour. In return drivers can look forward to sleeping in a plastic, uninsulated box without any real cleaning facilities, at risk of being mugged for diesel or their cargo. They routinely pressurised into bending or breaking the rules by their employers and then spending 10 hours a day driving.

The average age of HGV drivers is high and only getting higher, young people don’t want to do it, and even if they do, the costs of training is high and even when they pass, it takes years of driving smaller stuff for even lower wages until they have enough experience for insurers to cover them on big stuff.

Pre-Brexit lots of the roles were filled by Eastern European drivers, the wages here being pretty attractive compared with home, but most have left, why work in Brexit Britain when it’s just as easy to work in the rest of the EU when wages are just as good, but conditions are better with better facilities for drivers etc.

It was this lack of drivers that forced a couple of stations to close about a week ago, from their the panic grew, but it was an indication of a pretty big problem that’s been simmering for years and now there’s no cheap labour coming in to do it, the industry can’t make it attractive enough for Brits to do it, quick enough.

Pre-Brexit lots of the roles were filled by Eastern European drivers, the wages here being pretty attractive compared with home, but most have left, why work in Brexit Britain when it’s just as easy to work in the rest of the EU when wages are just as good, but conditions are better with better facilities for drivers etc.

So the wages are the same UK vs EU but we’re more attractive but have less facilities so less attractive?

Right.

A person can be intelligent but people are stupid?

Agent Kay enlightened us in 1997 with:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

My mate Al, who’s an artic driver for Maccy D’s (not BP) summed it up perfectly…

“Why would I drive a tanker full of petrol around for 12 quid an hour, when I can drive a trailer full of burgers around for 20 quid an hour?”

Thats supply and demand for you, and somewhat inevitable if the industry is 100,000 drivers down, as reported.

I thought the Tory’s were meant to know all about this sort of thing? What with it being the mantra of ‘her’? Doesn’t really look like it, does it? It looks like they’ve been caught out by the absolute basics of ‘The Market’ that they hold sacred

but it was an indication of a pretty big problem that’s been simmering for years and now there’s no cheap labour coming in to do it, the industry can’t make it attractive enough for Brits to do it, quick enough.

This is a warning for the government that other industries will have the same thing happen unless there is A Plan.

Not something this shower have much idea about.

This is a warning for the government that other industries will have the same thing happen unless there is A Plan.

Very few areas of Government have had A Plan for anything over the last decade. The country more or less stumbles on by usually in spite of Government rather than because of it. A few bits of reactive “must fix xxx”, some grand plan stuff (like HS2) which is never solely Government but a bunch of stakeholders too.

Other than that, the purpose seems to be to muddle along as best as possible without anything going too catastrophically wrong, make a few big announcements about extra funding whenever needed and then think about getting back into power at the next election.

“Why would I drive a tanker full of petrol around for 12 quid an hour, when I can drive a trailer full of burgers around for 20 quid an hour?”

that does somewhat point to this being an industry problem, rather than specifically to do with Brexit/Covid etc

How come an industry selling a product which is vital to our infrastructure doesn’t or cannot afford to pay as well as a “luxury” product like McD?

Obviously the wrong people have been coining it from the oil industry for too long and now that it’s on it’s arse, they can’t afford to pay a decent wage! The sooner the oil runs out and the whole industry disappears the better tbh 🤣

Local ( reliable ) paper reporting a Leeds petrol station sold 6 days of normal sales in 36 hours over the weekend …… no wonder some are running out …
On the plus side I still have enough in my third full tank to last till into next week
Sod queuing

Surely we must hit ‘tanks full’ sometime soon for the selfish people?

So the wages are the same UK vs EU but we’re more attractive but have less facilities so less attractive?

Right.

As far as I understand, pre-Brexit we were an attractive country for people from the poor counties in the EU with HGV licenses to come to work, the £ was strong so they could work here for weeks at a time, sending money back home to their families in their home country. Conditions for Lorry drivers are notoriously bad, but I guess at least a meaningful amount of them saw UK work as being worth it.

Post Brexit, unless they moved to the UK and lived here, they can’t do that anymore, the Gov still doesn’t see HGV driving as a Shortage Occupation and as you don’t need A Levels to do it, they don’t even see it as skilled work.

In France, Germany etc, conditions are better, they have facilities for showering etc, simple stuff like that, plus they freedom of movement.

Offering 5000 visas for HGV drivers to come here until Xmas eve and then sod off, isn’t going to attract many to do it. The UK is a wealthy country, even with all that’s gone on, there are many easier ways for young people to earn £28k a year, that doesn’t involve staring out of a windscreen for 10 hours a day, or shitting in bags.

You can argue with my points if you like, I’m by no means an expert, but it’s a fact that we have a fundamental problem with a shortage of qualified HGV drivers which meant a few stations had to close because they couldn’t resupply them, which caused the panic. We used to have more, but we told them we didn’t want them working here and they had to leave, we did the same to people in all sorts of industries and now we’re paying the penalty for that. You might argue that, they should be British jobs for British people, after-all, there are 1.5m unemployed people in the UK, but it’s not like you can just pluck anyone off the street and give them the keys to a 44t lorry and hope for the best, you have to make the work attractive and wait for them to train etc.

If I was in charge, I wouldn’t be pretending it’s all make believe as if we haven’t been seeing shortages of lots of things for months, I’d be announcing plans to build facilities for lorry drivers, offering grants for training and allowing market forces to set the wages, or allow freedom of movement again and import people from poorer counties to do the dirty and dangerous work we don’t want to do.

Paid £20 for 5 litres of special ethanol free petrol to make sure my brother could get home on his motorcycle yesterday as all the stations round here had been bled dry. The joke being that normally he would have been more than happy to cycle the 85 miles home as he closes in on membership of the 300k miles club 😃

Surely we must hit ‘tanks full’ sometime soon for the selfish people?

Lots of people are using extra fuel driving around to find fuel though.

No one else seen the video of someone buying 2l bottled water, emptying them on the forecourt and then refilling them with petrol from the pumps?

there are 33,000,000 cars on uk roads. lets say on average, their tanks are 50l and half full. For everyone to brim their tank it would take 825,000,000l of fuel (ish).

There are approx 8,000 petrol stations in the uk, so we’d need an average of 100,000l of fuel per petrol station to fill up all the tanks. It seems (this figure I’m struggling to find) that an average petrol station might hold 30,000l of fuel and gets a delivery once per week (?) so the shortage could last 3 weeks (?)

but not everyone is being a moron, so it should be over quicker

Only a matter of time before some of these idiots decanting petrol into plastic bottles have an accident.

It’s Dawinism, but I’m sure the fire brigade have cancelled all leave

A lot of people routinely run their tanks close to empty – just putting in £10-£20 when needed so they are both more liable to run out and also have spare capacity to fill, hence a lot of cars going from 1/4 to full which will suck up a lot of litres nationally.

It’s just like the electric car cycnics said

I don’t have a driveway to refine crude oil into petrol on , where am I supposed to fill my car up?

It’s just like the electric car cycnics said

the infrastructure can cope when a few people need it but what happens when everyone wants fuel at the same time?