As if the price of fuel wasn’t bad enough, British caravanners have been given more bad news with the announcement that there are fewer than 9,000 petrol forecourts in the UK, less than half the 21,000 that were in operation twenty years ago.
What’s more, this fall has happened at the same time as the number of cars on the roads has doubled to 31 million, research by retail experts Palmer & Harvey has revealed.
The south of England has been hit the worst, with eight of the country’s ten ‘fuel deserts’ lying in the region’s countryside.
Torridge in Devon has the lowest ratio of cars to forecourts, with Palmer and Harvey reporting there were some 11,300 cars per forecourt in the 380 sq mile rural region.
Chris Etherington, Palmer and Harvey chief executive, told the Daily Telegraph: “These fuel deserts lead to massive inconvenience for the already hard-pressed motorist, and also to the loss of a focal point in communities.”
During the summer, the RMI Independent Petrol Retailers Association said that time was running out for many petrol stations, with supermarkets dropping petrol prices as a ‘loss leader’ effectively forcing them out of business, the newspaper reported.
