Ministers should encourage workers to work from home more amid looming fuel shortages, a former BP boss said today.
Professor Nick Butler, a former adviser to Gordon Brown and ex-VP of BP, said he believed Britain would be hit with shortages within weeks as the Strait of Hormuz has still not fully re-opened.
He attacked Labour for being ‘complacent’ and failing to ‘lay out a plan of what’s going to be done’ to deal with potential shortages because ‘other countries are doing it’.
Asked if ministers should be encouraging people to work from home more to save fuel, he said: ‘Yes, I think that that would be a perfectly sensible measure.’
He added: ‘I’m waiting for the government to publish what they’re supposed to publish in these circumstances, which is a national emergency fuel plan.
‘They haven’t done that. They hate the word rationing, and I think you’re right, there shouldn’t be panic buying.
‘But I think the way to avoid panic buying is to lay out a plan of what’s going to be done.’
He also suggested pump prices could spiral much further in future because of the Strait, which a fifth of the world’s oil travels through, still effectively remaining closed.
Speaking to Times Radio, he said: ‘We’ve now had six weeks during which none of the tankers have come through Hormuz.
‘Those tankers take weeks to get to their destination, and we’re now running out of the tankers that set off before the war began.
‘So there’s now going to be a real gap in supply. I think the boss of Shell said it a couple of weeks ago, and I think he was exactly right, that the real crisis for Britain and for Europe will come at the end of April and in early May, when the real shortage will translate into both a physical shortage and a sharp rise in prices.
‘I don’t think we’ve yet seen the full impact on prices of this loss of supply.
‘I think there are 230, 240 ships trapped in the Gulf and none now entering. So this is going to be a cumulative shortage over the next few months.’
Industry bosses have privately expressed concerns about potential shortages of diesel and jet fuel over the next month or so if the Strait remains shut.
But in better news for drivers, despite oil supply chains being thrown into chaos by the conflict, the RAC said it believed pump prices could fall within the next few weeks because wholesale diesel and petrol prices have dropped in recent days.
This should, in turn, be passed on at the pumps if retailers play fair with drivers.
Its data showed that pump prices stopped rising today for the first time in more than 40 days after average diesel prices rocketed nearly 35 per cent and petrol 26 per cent.
The motoring group’s fuel guru, Simon Williams, said: ‘Pump prices appear to have finally stopped rising after 43 days of increases which saw petrol go up 25.5p a litre to 158.3p and diesel 49p to 191.54p.
‘Wholesale fuel costs are now significantly lower than they were at the start of the month, so forecourt prices should begin to come down. As things stand, we’d expect petrol and diesel to drop by several pence a litre in the next week or so.’
Compared to average pump prices before the conflict started on 28 February, it is now £14 more costly to fill the typical 55-litre tank in a family car with petrol and £27 for diesel.
