Why is the fuel price so high?

This week saw average fuel prices approaching a pound a litre and widespread fuel protests for the first time since 2000. Do the protesters have a point?

Is fuel at an all-time high? Not in real terms, no. Adjusting for price inflation, we have seen prices above 90p a litre several times in recent decades in 2000, 1986, 1981 and 1974. Moreover, in the three decades since 1974 (and even in the five years since 2000), average incomes have risen rather faster than inflation, while cars have become much more fuel-efficient. So all things being equal, you are almost certainly paying rather less in overall fuel costs than previous generations did. Motoring costs have held steady in recent years, particularly in comparison to the surging cost of travelling on public transport (see chart, below left). That said, petrol prices have recently risen sharply and are at an all-time high in nominal terms.

Why have prices risen so much?

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.