Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the cost of petrol for consumers.

The Department monitors the prices of crude oil and retail road fuels and publishes weekly reports at

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-petroleum-products-weekly-statistics.

The Department’s analysis indicates that changes in the price of crude oil are the main driver of changes in the national average retail prices of petrol and diesel.

The Government believes that it is essential that consumers get a fair deal and that a competitive market is the best way to keep prices low. The Office of Fair Trading last looked at this in 2013, and I expect its successor, the Competition and Markets Authority, to keep this under review.