Oil Companies - Rolling In It Right?

Well, Royal Dutch Shell's profits have been announced as £13.9 billion during 2007. This, as I'm sure you agree, is rather more than chump change. In fact, if you're a shareholder, you're probably expecting a nice little windfall now. Which is fine, you deserve the money if you bought the shares. What annoys me though is the amount of people complaining about it.

The average man on the street is really annoyed when they hear about the profit levels of such companies as Shell as they feel that it is their fault that petrol is now above £1 per litre in just about all of the UK. However, they're not really to blame now are they?

The fact is that you pay duty on fuel, and lots of it. You then go on to pay tax on the fuel that has duty levied against it - something which in my opinion should be illegal - but hey, there we are. A breakdown of the profit from 1 litre of petrol is something like this...

66p - goes directly to the government
10p - goes to the retailer
24p - pays for the petrol in various ways

So, who's really responsible for the fact that petrol is so bloody expensive? Well, look again at the breakdown. It's clearly only one organisation - the government. The problem is several-fold. First, to reduce congestion 'they' (the grey men in Parliament) think that the cost is acceptable. Second, the cost is further justified these days as a 'green tax' - ironic given the fact that it was hardly a concern just a few years ago.

What can we do then? Well, unfortunately not a lot. Those of you who can use LPG are rather lucky. The rest of us should make sure that we support businesses who lobby the government to maintain (or even god forbid, lower) the level of taxation we pay on this most necessary of substances.