Yesterday, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander told BBC1’s The Politics Show that although it was “a complicated idea” and “difficult to see precisely how we achieve it” it was something the government was looking at carefully, echoing comments made by Prime Minister David Cameron last week.
At the same time, Mr Alexander said the coalition was examining the possibility of offering a discount on fuel to people living in remote areas of the UK, including the Scottish Highlands, the Western Isles, west Wales and parts of England and Northern Ireland.
Petrol retailers in those areas are likely to be hoping that if the move goes ahead, it happens sooner rather than later.
According to a report in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, Brian Madderson, chairman of the Retail Motor Industry Federation’s petrol division, says that rural petrol stations will soon be a thing of the past, thanks to soaring fuel prices that are encouraging a trend of motorists preferring to drive up to 30 miles to use cheaper supermarket filling stations or large petrol retailers in urban areas.
He says: “I fear the whole refuelling network in this country is now under threat. By the end of the decade, there will be no retail petrol stations in country areas.”
And he predicts that 500 petrol retailers, the majority in rural areas, will go out of business in the next 12 months, resulting in the loss of around 5,000 jobs.
That’s a grim prospect indeed. Anyone who has ever lived in a rural area will know that a car is a virtual necessity, due to the inadequacies of public transport links, and the disappearance of local petrol stations will do nothing to make life easier.
High fuel prices are affecting us all, in one way or another. Helping people out in rural communities, with the particular challenges they face, is probably a good place to start for the coalition. But the whole country is also looking for some support to ease their pain.
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