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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answer of 1 October 2019 to Question 291262, if he will place in the Library a copy of the provisions of the referenced fuel supply contingency programme which would be deployed in the event of disruption to fuel supplies in the event of the UK leaving the EU without a deal.

The Government’s long-standing fuel supply contingency programme is not publicly available to protect the sensitive operational information it contains, and to prevent the efficacy of the plans from being compromised. The specific plans for Brexit also contain sensitive commercial information.

As set out in my previous answer, the Government believes that in most circumstances the fuel industry is well positioned to respond to disruptions to the supply chain. However, if required, our contingency programme includes measures to help the industry coordinate their response and increase its effectiveness as well as a reserve fleet of road tankers to increase the logistics capacity available for fuel supplies in the event of a disruption. The appropriate elements of this programme required will be decided in the context of any specific incident.