Saudi Arabia and Russia have done the British driver more favours this spring than the Labour government has. OPEC+ has agreed another supply increase for May 2026, designed to bring global crude prices down. In any normal country, that would mean cheaper petrol and diesel within weeks. In Britain, it means almost nothing.
Forecourt prices remain stubbornly high. The average litre of unleaded is hovering near 150p. Diesel is closer to 160p. The wholesale price of crude has fallen, but the pump price has barely moved. The reason is straightforward: tax. Roughly 60 per cent of every litre at the pump is taken by the Treasury before the retailer makes a penny.
Net Zero Has Become a Stealth Fuel Duty
Ed Miliband's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero — the body Reform UK has rightly called the Net Zero Dustbin — has loaded the energy system with policy costs. Renewables Obligation payments. Contracts for Difference levies. Smart-meter rollout costs. Standing charges that have doubled in real terms since 2019. Each of those costs has to come from somewhere, and "somewhere" is the bill payer.
The Office for Budget Responsibility now estimates that net zero policy costs add hundreds of pounds a year to a typical household bill, even after the much-trumpeted "policy cost removal" from April 2026. British households are subsidising offshore wind farms while Saudi-led production cuts and rises decide whether they can afford to drive to work. That is not energy security. That is energy dependency dressed up as virtue.
The North Sea Has Been Closed for Business
Domestic oil and gas could be cushioning British consumers from every twist of the OPEC+ negotiation. Instead, Labour has frozen new North Sea licences, hiked the windfall tax to a level that has driven operators out of the basin, and signalled to global capital that British hydrocarbons are not a long-term investment. The result is predictable. We import more. We pay world prices in full. We are exposed to every geopolitical shock from Riyadh to Moscow.
Meanwhile, this same government has just handed France £662 million to police our southern coastline. It will spend hundreds of millions to manage the symptoms of borders we have lost, but will not spend a penny extracting the energy under our own seabed. That is the priority list Labour has chosen.
Drivers Are Paying for an Ideology
I represent Preston East, a constituency where rural drivers, tradespeople, delivery riders and small business owners depend on the price at the pump. Every penny of fuel tax is a penny they do not spend in local shops, on their families, on their pensions. The cost-of-living crisis is not abstract. It has a postcode.
When the world's oil cartel is doing more to lower the cost of running a car than His Majesty's Government, something has gone profoundly wrong with British energy policy. Labour does not have an energy strategy. It has an ideology, and the country is paying the bill.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would scrap the windfall tax, restart North Sea licensing, and abolish the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. We would strip net zero levies off household bills and fund any genuinely needed transition costs from general taxation, where they can be openly debated rather than hidden in a standing charge.
We would cut fuel duty by 10p a litre on day one. We would suspend the planned move to mandatory electric vehicle sales targets that distort the market and punish working drivers. Cheap, secure, sovereign energy is not an optional extra. It is the foundation of a functioning economy. Labour has forgotten that. Reform UK has not.