The UK government could bring army personnel in to address the fuel shortage in British petrol stations, reports suggest.
According to the Guardian , Boris Johnson and senior cabinet members are set to meet and discuss invoking Operation Escalin, in an effort to prevent any further deterioration of the situation.
The news comes after scenes of mass panic buying of fuel over the weekend, with some people waiting for hours to get into petrol stations and fill up.
Why is there a fuel crisis?
Filling stations have been struggling to obtain fuel supplies because of the ongoing shortage of HGV drivers, which has also left supermarket shelves increasingly bare.
Large-scale panic buying - comparable to that seen in supermarkets at the state of pandemics - set in last week, as fears of a fuel shortage grew.
How bad is the fuel shortage?
The Petrol Retailers Association - which represents around 5,500 independent filling stations - says that between 50% and 90% of its members are out of fuel.
BP, meanwhile, has said that about a third of its petrol stations have run out of the two main grades of fuel.
What is the government doing about the fuel crisis?
As a last-ditch effort to resolve the fuel crisis, the UK government is understood to be considering bringing soldiers in to drive lorries and make deliveries to petrol stations.
Operation Escalin, as it’s known, was initially devised during contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit, and would involve bringing Army personnel in to man a reserve fleet of 80 tankers.
However, some of those personnel may already be away on Army deployments elsewhere, while others are reservists. This means that it could take up to three weeks to implement the plan.
The government has also given fuel firms a temporary exemption from some terms of the Competition Act, allowing them to share information and coordinate fuel supply.
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