The Competition and Markets Authority has kept UK road-fuel retailers under heightened scrutiny after finding that weak competitive pressure continues to support elevated margins, even though it found no evidence of companies deliberately changing pricing strategies to exploit the Middle East crisis.
The regulator’s latest monitoring report examined petrol and diesel prices, wholesale costs, retailer margins, and the rollout of Fuel Finder through the end of June.
It found that falling wholesale costs contributed to lower pump prices during June, although prices remained significantly above their pre-conflict levels.
The CMA said it had not identified evidence that retailers actively changed their pricing strategies to take advantage of the disruption. It remains concerned, however, that widespread use of passive pricing strategies is helping to sustain high margins and weakening the competitive pressure that would normally encourage faster price reductions.
Its analysis found that some retailers did not immediately pass falling wholesale diesel prices through to motorists. Faster reductions, the regulator said, would have increased pressure on competitors to respond.
CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said the authority expected reductions in wholesale prices to be “rapidly and fully passed on to drivers”.
The regulator will carry out a more detailed review in the autumn, including analysis of retailers’ pricing strategies, the speed with which wholesale changes reach forecourts, and the reasons prices differ between local areas.
The continued focus follows a longer competition problem in UK road fuel. The CMA’s 2023 market study concluded that competition had weakened and that higher supermarket margins had contributed to motorists paying more at the pump.
Since then, government has introduced a statutory price-data regime and expanded the CMA’s monitoring role. Fuel Finder is intended to make current petrol and diesel prices available through consumer-facing services, reducing the effort required to compare nearby forecourts.
Registration has now reached substantial market coverage. Around 97% of UK petrol stations are registered and those sites account for an estimated 99% of road fuel sold. The overwhelming majority of registered sites have supplied an updated price within the previous week.
The enforcement position also shows how the scheme is bedding in. Since the end of the registration grace period in April, the CMA has sent 1,166 letters to retailers and issued compliance notices covering 53 sites. It has not yet needed to impose financial penalties for registration failures.
The regime changes the competitive environment because fuel pricing has historically been highly local. Motorists can face meaningful differences within relatively small geographic areas, but those differences exert less competitive pressure when customers do not know where cheaper fuel is available.
Greater transparency should make price-sensitive customers more mobile between sites and increase the commercial cost of remaining above nearby competitors. Whether that effect is strong enough to reduce margins will depend on consumer use of Fuel Finder-backed services and on how quickly retailers adjust.
The economics of the market remain complicated by factors beyond retailer control. Crude oil prices, refining capacity, shipping, exchange rates, wholesale product prices, fuel duty, and VAT all influence the amount motorists ultimately pay.
Geopolitical disruption adds another layer of volatility. Sudden increases in wholesale prices tend to reach retailers quickly because replacement inventory becomes more expensive, while falling wholesale prices can take longer to filter through depending on purchasing arrangements and competitive behaviour.
That asymmetry is central to the regulator’s scrutiny. A market where increases pass through rapidly but reductions arrive slowly can sustain wider retail spreads even without explicit coordination between companies.
The latest findings stop short of accusing retailers of crisis profiteering. They instead reinforce a structural concern that competitive pressure has not yet returned to a level the regulator considers sufficient.
Large vehicle fleets are directly exposed to the outcome. Logistics, construction, field services, passenger transport, and other road-intensive sectors carry fuel as a material operating input, making the pace of wholesale pass-through commercially significant beyond household motoring.
Fuel Finder could also gradually alter procurement behaviour among smaller fleet operators if pricing data becomes easier to incorporate into route planning or employee-fuel policies.
The autumn review will provide a more substantive test of whether transparency is beginning to change retailer behaviour. Registration levels are already high, so the next question is whether the availability of pricing data produces stronger competition rather than simply better information about existing differences.
The CMA’s current position remains deliberately cautious: it has not found evidence of active exploitation during the crisis, but it is not satisfied that the road-fuel market is competing effectively enough to ensure lower wholesale costs reach customers as quickly as they should.
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