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The Government's much talked about Fuel Finder scheme, designed to help drivers save money on petrol and diesel, has been branded a 'disaster' by a leading motoring organisation.
The scheme, which has cost the taxpayer £2million, has faced multiple data errors that make it impossible for drivers to know whether forecourt prices are up to date and could cost drivers as much as £260 a year.
Created for the Government’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), Fuel Finder gives third party websites and apps fuel price data so drivers can, theoretically, find the cheapest fuel.
However, the data has been deemed 'woefully inaccurate'.
Research by automotive consumer champion, What Car?, found the Government's Fuel Finder to have serious 'flaws' - from wrong locations to incorrectly labelled forecourts.
Clare Lafferty from PetrolPrices.com, which supplied What Car? with data, commented: 'If someone is relying on the Fuel Finder data to try and save money, if they're in an area where some of the fuel stations aren’t updating prices, they are at a disadvantage.'
What are the issues with Fuel Finder?
Data supplied to What Car? by PetrolPrices.com, shows that nine of the 8,300 fuel stations on the data feed have their longitude and latitude co-ordinates the wrong way round.
Nine petrol stations even appear to be in the Indian Ocean rather than the UK and 155 petrol stations are shown as 500 metres or more away from actual location, making them difficult to find.
Similarly, 825 petrol stations are marked incorrectly as supermarkets, and 81 supermarkets are not flagged as such.
This is worrying as supermarkets typically sell fuel at lower prices than other fuel retailers and are often sought out by drivers looking for the cheapest petrol and diesel.
Thirty-five non-motorway petrol stations are marked as motorway service areas, and six motorway locations are not flagged up as being on the motorway network.
Again, this causes concerns about how much drivers will be paying because these forecourts are typically the costliest places for a tank of fuel.
Previous What Car? research estimated the inaccuracies could cost the average motorist £260 a year.
This is based on a typical driver being charged around 8p per litre more than the government data suggests.
It mocks DESNZ's claim that the scheme could save drivers £40 a year.
It will also let down the 67 per cent of motorists who told the AA they will start to monitor their local pump prices on mobile and other devices when the scheme first launched.
The Fuel Finder scheme is also failing motorists because it can be very difficult for motorists to determine whether pricing information is up to date - the point of the scheme.
VE3 Global, the company that implemented the scheme, decided in March this year that it would no longer allow retailers to confirm prices regularly and would instead only allow them to do so when they change.
Before this decision, many fuel retailers had been re-entering prices at least once a day – even when they hadn’t changed – so people could see they were up to date.
Now prices might not change for weeks at a time, and it’s impossible for consumers to know whether this is because they’re out of date or just haven’t changed.
Lafferty said: 'The implementation has been a disaster. Both the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), [which oversees the scheme] and VE3 Global [which implements it] have been poor in engaging with the industry about how to get it to work.'
What Car?’s consumer editor, Claire Evans, said: 'The Government has said repeatedly that its Fuel Finder service helps consumers save money by finding the cheapest fuel, but the extremely poor quality of the information provided and the lack of transparency about prices being up to date makes Fuel Finder not fit for purpose.'
Why was the Fuel Finder scheme launched?
It was launched following a major investigation into the fuel retail sector discovered drivers are being ripped off consistently at the pumps.
Since 2023, Competition and Markets Authorit6y (CMA) has called for the implementation of the statutory scheme, finding evidence of weakened competition in the fuel retail industry post pandemic.
In her Autumn Budget Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed the Fuel Finder Scheme would be implemented.
The launch was initially celebrated by motoring organisations who called it 'the start of the journey to cheaper fuel prices around the UK'.
Daily Mail and This is Money has contacted the Department for Transport for comment.
