Comment by tolien

4 hours ago

> I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience.

We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).

The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:

> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.

Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.