As inflation refuses to submit to ever-increasing interest rates, the government and the Bank of England are – finally – beginning to move their focus from wages to company profits. The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has warned banks they may face tighter regulation if they do not pass on interest rate rises to savers, while the Bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, admitted on 6 July that some retailers “have possibly been charging too much” for petrol, after the Competition and Markets Authority found that retailers had added an extra £900m to the mark-up on fuel. Grant Shapps, the Energy Secretary, has said that from now on petrol stations will be made to share their pricing data with the public. “We’ll shine a light on rip-off retailers to drive down prices,” he said.
What Shapps seems not to have grasped is that this data is already widely shared. Every petrol station in the UK connects to a data source that records the prices of every other petrol station on a daily basis. The prices that emerge from this system aren’t decided by cigar-chewing executives in pinstriped suits, but by algorithms.
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