Welcome to Vote With Your Wheels
Disgruntled fuel buyer? You are not alone; there are thousands if not millions of us feeling the same way that you do.
Consider this:
In 1992 petrol sales from supermarkets amounted to 11% of the total market, a figure that has risen in 2008 to 40%. In the UK the two biggest sellers of petrol are BP and Tesco. Tesco buys its petrol from BP. That is huge profits through one supplier and one supermarket.
Many of us believe that our loyalty as consumers is being taken for granted. Despite many supermarkets now offering discounts on fuel, these discounts have been slow in coming and are viewed by many of us as token gestures.
In the case of the UK government ~ average excise duty on fuel since October 2007 has been 50.35 pence per litre. Average duty in the rest of Europe is 22.7 pence per litre. Does this seem fair to you?
The UK government is making a killing ~ just like major fuel suppliers and supermarkets. We believe our custom and our loyalty to these companies has been taken for granted.
They have grown so big they assume we will continue to buy from them. They believe for the sake of location, convenience and habit we will always pay the price they ask for.
At Vote With Your Wheels, we want to shake that assumption.
If we do nothing then nothing will change. Help us to petition those in control of the price we pay for fuel; the oil companies, the filling stations, the big supermarkets and especially the government.
No company is so big or government so powerful that people cannot walk away from it. Thousands of us can threaten to move our spending power elsewhere unless our view that fuel is overpriced is taken notice of.
We want a quicker response by retailers to oil price fluctuation. We want to reduce the duty paid on fuel to the Chancellor but in particular we want to force a rethink in the 2p proposed rise in duty which was planned and recently postponed by Gordon Brown. We want this rise cancelled for good and demand that the chancellor replaces the levy by a fairer system.
Your participation can make a difference.
The greater number of lobbyists in our group, voting with their wheels, the more we can target oil companies to provide a realistic price for fuel and the government to provide a realistic level of duty.
