George Lawlor Demands Answers on Forecourt Fuel Prices

Thank you very much folks and you're very welcome to the committee and thank you for the very valuable work that you do and probably most important in the current times we all find ourselves in. I have a couple of questions in relation to the cost of living and of course we are inundated with correspondence from people who would probably never ever write to public representatives but find themselves put to the pin of their collar at the minute. One of the questions I have is do we have any data on the retailing of fuel from the point of view of what the retailers margins are in terms of and I'll give you a couple of examples that I found quite concerning that have been supplied to me as late as 30 seconds ago in terms of the fluidity of pricing of fuel. This comes from a small to medium family run business in Wexford operating on the fuel card system and on the 15th of the 4th which was yesterday, yesterday, they were being quoted 149 per litre of diesel, ex-fat, from their supplier which is working and if you add 23% fat onto that I'll let the chairman use his mathematical genius to work out and today he's just messaged me and he's sending me screenshots of his quotation. That's 139 today excluding that. Now if we contrast that with what's been charged on the forecourts and I know we have small retailers but essentially many of them are franchises of massive conglomerates in terms of the main suppliers. So I'm wondering what data we have in that area because these prices that he has been quoted are substantially less than people are paying on the forecourt to fill their cars. Let's give you an example of some of the stuff that he sent me. Your latest fuel price is effective the 16th of the 4th, 2026, diesel 139.8, kerosene 135.7, petrol 142.26. That's the latest update this morning with the excise reduced. That's 172 including VAT for diesel but that is substantially less than people are paying on the forecourts and I appreciate there are small retailers involved or relatively small or small to medium retailers involved but they are supplying people as they pull up in their cars or as they try to get to work at a substantially greater price per litre than this person is being provided. So what information do we have in relation to what's on the forecourt in terms of retailers? Can we get that information or do you have that information? Is that something that you have the power to investigate? Because if we're banging the drum here in dull air and condemning the handling of the fuel crisis, and this is happening out on our highways and byways across the country, I think there's questions that must be asked of people who haven't been questioned yet. As I say, there are massive businesses, I'm not going to name them, we all know who they are, that every second garage belongs to a particular company maybe with a circle on it, and they're buying fuel at substantially less prices than they are, than the consumer is paying. And I think that's a question that we need to ask as well. We see it in the supermarket industry also where we don't know what profits they're making. They don't release their profits in Ireland but I believe they do in other countries but not in Ireland. But yet people are pushing their trolleys up to the till in fear of what the total is just to exist. So I'd be grateful if you could give me some sort of response to that. Thank you. Yeah. So, I mean, in the report and generally when we look at any market, we would always look at profit margins. It is one of the key indicators. So we have set out the profit margins that we could access in terms of that were public available in the report that we recently produced, and those were between 2% and 4% that the margins of those companies, and those are comparable with the margins that we see from those type of companies in other jurisdictions as well. I mean, similarly, just to touch on groceries, because we did a number of reviews of the grocery sector, and again, we did look at margins, and quite a number of the margins of the Irish groceries are actually published, not all of them, you're correct, but quite a number of them are, and again, you're looking at margins of 2% to 4%. They tend to be very high volume, relatively lower margin industries anyway. But those are the type of margins, the profits that those companies are making, and that's what we've kind of set out in the report. I mean, in 2022, we also did an in-depth, a much more in-depth study of the fuel market and petrol and diesel. So we took hourly figures from hundreds of petrol stations, we looked at the whole supply chain in terms of breaking it down as to how the industry worked, what made up the price that the consumer was paying for, and set that out. So again, from our experience of that market, the idea of margins of 2% to 4% didn't surprise us when it's what we saw in the recent report as well. None of this changes the fact that consumers, because we hear from them every day on our helpline, are suffering real pain, and that this is a massive problem for families throughout Ireland. We understand that. But for us, in terms of the idea that a key part of the problem is significant profits made in a non-competitive market, we don't see the evidence for that. You're satisfied that you're not seeing the evidence of any gouging, as it has been described over the recent times? Yeah. So, and again... Despite the fact that the figures that I've given you in relation to today, after the reduction, of course, diesel 139 expat, albeit with a fuel card, I mean, that's substantially lower. Yeah, so... And 2% to 4% doesn't really make sense to me on that. Yeah, so, I mean, we have received over 1,000 complaints, and there was a lot of information that we received, and we welcome complaints from all consumers, because it is how we get our information, and it can be really, really useful. But when we look overall at the fuel market, and we looked at how prices have changed in that period in the start of March, and we've set it all out in the report, a lot of the data we've set out is publicly available, though not all of it is. What we found is what drove that price increase was wholesale prices. There is... We did not see... And again, we do think, and again, if you go back to the 2022 report, you do see certain days, because we had so much data at that time, now it took us eight months to do, very in-depth. You do see certain days where certain petrol stations will make higher profits. So you're... The clock is against me. So you're satisfied on diesel at 2 euro, to take a round figure, a litre, that the profit is between 4 cent and 8 cent? So yes, we're... At the retailer. We're satisfied that, in terms of what with the real pain that consumers are facing, isn't driven by high profits, outside of what we would normally expect in a market like fuel. So the margins that we see, and we saw them previously, are around 2 to 4 per cent.