UK Pump Prices Set to Break the All-Time Record by Sunday Lunchtime — Brent at $126 Will Push Petrol Through £1.85 a Litre Within Forty-Eight Hours, Reeves Holds an Emergency Treasury Call With Shell and BP at 8pm Thursday, and the Fuel-Duty Cut Promised in November Has Already Run Out of Cushion

The four-year high in Brent crude will push the UK’s average forecourt petrol price through the all-time record of £1.84 a litre by Sunday lunchtime, an RAC analysis circulated to the Treasury at 6:14pm Thursday concludes. Diesel will follow on Tuesday. Rachel Reeves convened an emergency conference call at 8pm with the chief executives of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil UK and the Petroleum Retailers Association. The fuel-duty cut Reeves announced at the November Budget — five pence a litre, scaled to a $95 oil-price assumption — is, at $126, exhausted. The political problem this lands on the Prime Minister’s desk seven days before a local election in which Reform is six points clear is, by the Cabinet Office’s own classification at 9pm, “urgent and electorally consequential.”

The arithmetic of the pump

UK retail fuel pricing follows Brent, refining margins and exchange rate, with a lag of between three and seven days. The RAC’s Thursday model uses a $126 Brent assumption, a one-pence-a-litre refining margin uplift driven by the Hormuz disruption, and a sterling-dollar rate of $1.21. The output is an average forecourt petrol price of £1.86 a litre on Sunday, falling to £1.85 if Brent settles back to $122 by Tuesday and rising to £1.91 if Brent moves above $130 next week. Diesel, off a higher base and a tighter European refining picture, will print at £1.94 by Tuesday and £1.97 if Brent holds. The all-time UK record is £1.91 for diesel, set in July 2022, and £1.91 for petrol, set the same week. Both records, on the model the Treasury is now working from, fall this weekend.

What Reeves asked the majors

The 8pm conference call, which lasted seventeen minutes, was Reeves, two Treasury officials, the BP chief executive, the Shell head of UK retail, the ExxonMobil UK managing director and the PRA director-general. The Chancellor asked, in the order they appear in the readout circulated at 9:42pm, four questions. Will the majors hold forecourt prices through the May 7 election? Will they offer a voluntary “windfall” rebate to motorists this weekend? Are their UK strategic reserves sufficient to maintain supply if the Hormuz disruption extends past July? And, in a question that was reportedly asked twice, will any of them return any portion of their first-quarter profits to the Treasury via the existing Energy Profits Levy framework? The answers, briefed to lobby correspondents at 10:14pm, were: no, no, yes, and no.

The political position

Starmer is in the North East. The petrol-price story landed in his red box on the train to Newcastle at 6pm. The Prime Minister’s political team have, on the available reporting, told him this is the worst possible week for it — the Doncaster pivot to energy bills was meant to be the campaign close, not the curtain-raiser for a fuel-pump crisis that the Treasury cannot, on its current fiscal headroom, buy off. The Chancellor’s £30 billion wealth-tax win, announced last week, has been substantially absorbed by the Treasury’s revised gilts-issuance programme. There is, on the Treasury’s own pre-pump-price-spike analysis, no further headroom available for an emergency fuel-duty cut without breaking the fiscal rules and triggering an OBR re-forecast. Reform’s political team, briefed at 9pm, will lead Friday’s campaign event in Boston, Lincolnshire on petrol prices. Farage will, per a person familiar, hold a five-pence-a-litre receipt up to the cameras.

What the Treasury is actually considering

Three options are on the Chancellor’s desk by Friday morning. The first is a temporary VAT-on-fuel suspension, deficit-cost £1.4 billion a month, that would bring petrol back below £1.70 on day one. The second is a one-week emergency duty cut of ten pence a litre, deficit-cost £800 million a week, scaled to a one-month duration. The third is a windfall-tax rebate — the Treasury collects an additional £3.2 billion from the majors over Q2 and Q3 and recycles it directly to motorists via the existing fuel-rebate mechanism. Senior Treasury officials, briefed Thursday night, told this site they regard the third as the only option that the Chancellor could politically defend at the despatch box. The first two break her fiscal rules. The third does not, but it requires Shell, BP and ExxonMobil to participate, and on Thursday night’s call, they said no.

The election and the pump

Local elections are won and lost on visibility. There is no more visible price in British politics than the price on the petrol pump forecourt. Reform leads the Westminster average by six points and is on a YouGov MRP track for forty-two council majorities on May 7. The fuel-pump record breaks on Sunday. The Prime Minister speaks in Newcastle on Friday afternoon and, per the Number 10 grid circulated at 11pm, has now scrapped the Saturday morning visit to a Sunderland school in favour of a Treasury-side announcement on fuel prices to be co-fronted with the Chancellor. The political question is whether anything Reeves announces on Saturday morning is faster than the price boards on the forecourts on Sunday lunchtime. The available evidence says no.