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Customers are still buying gasoline across the country with gas stations emptied within hours, the Petrol Retailers Association chairman said, as a Tory MP urged the military to start deliveries to restore confidence public.
PRA Chairman Brian Madderson said members feared putting a £ 30 cap on purchases due to the risk of people being confronted with staff and said it would be impossible to prioritize workers keys for fuel.
“As soon as a tank truck arrives at a gas station, people on social media report that a tank truck has arrived and it’s like bees in a pot of honey. Everyone is flocking there and… within hours it’s out again, ”he told BBC Radio 4’s Today program.
Madderson said its members will not place limits on the purchase. “It’s confrontational, we don’t want to put our staff at risk by confronting their customers, so that has advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages.”
He also said he does not tolerate profit and called on members to think twice before raising their prices.
“The only thing we don’t tolerate is profit in situations like this,” he said. “Most of our members, the independents, have regular customers and if they offend their customers, they don’t deserve to have them when this crisis is over,” he said. “People have long memories and I urge anyone who thinks of trying to make a quick buck to think again because it’s just not right.”
Number 10 said army drivers would be ready to help deliver gasoline and diesel at short notice, but stopped ahead of an immediate deployment, though some essential workers were unable to perform their work without fuel.
Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the parliament’s defense select committee, said the military should be mobilized, not just put on hold, to “regain public confidence” and end panic buying.
“The country wants to see the government in the driver’s seat and it has a clear plan between Whitehall,” he told Sky News. “We have gone from a 1% fuel pump shortage to 90%, so changing people’s buying behavior to avoid panic buying and revert to previous buying patterns requires regaining the nation’s confidence.
“I think the army should not only be put on hold, but in fact mobilized, seen as used. This will of course help alleviate the pressure on shortages, it will restore public confidence, and on top of that there is the more important issue of articulating a clear strategy to alleviate the chronic shortage of truck drivers.
Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said the failure was the result of government inaction, rather than blaming the public.
He said the shortage of heavy truck drivers was a “catastrophic failure of leadership” and said he had warned Transportation Secretary Grant Shapps of the impending disaster.
“We find ourselves in this position due to a total failure of the government to lead and plan ahead,” he said. “I and other shadow cabinet colleagues wrote to Grant Shapps in July to highlight these issues. We received very little time from Grant Shapps, who responded to us in the first week of August saying, in his words, that he would not use foreign labor to resolve this issue.
“Now the government says it wants to train… and I’m absolutely in favor of training heavy truck drivers, but it hasn’t done it to a sufficient extent, and it hasn’t done so far. recently a very small concession on being able to bring in drivers from abroad.
“So this is a catastrophic leadership failure, it looks like we ended up running out of gas, the prime minister is talking about bringing in the army. It is a crisis of the government’s own initiative.”
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