Whether you stayed up all night to watch the results come in, or you saw the news this morning, you’ll no doubt know by now that Brexit is happening. The referendum resulted in a narrow but clear victory for the “Leave” campaign, and as a result Britain is now taking its first steps towards leaving the EU.

Back in April / May we conducted a poll of our members, which included questions on Brexit voting intentions. If you are one of our members, you may have participated. Thanks to a fantastic response, it turned out to be the biggest poll conducted during the whole referendum campaign, and the first to correctly predict a “Leave” outcome, as reported at the time by The Sun.

We now know it was also extremely representative of the real life outcome, predicting the leave / remain split correctly across all four UK nations to within a couple of percentage points. For example, our poll pointed to England voting 55% in favour of Leave, with the real-life result being 53.4% in favour of Leave.

What does Brexit mean for petrol prices?

There’s no way to sugar-coat the fact that it’s almost inevitable that petrol prices WILL rise in the coming weeks in the aftermath of the referendum result.

The key reason for this is the enormous fall in the value of Sterling – the biggest drop seen since the mid-80s. As oil is purchased in Dollars, it’s immediately become considerably more expensive for Britain to buy. As a result, both The AA and the Petrol Retailers Association are predicting increases of up to three pence per litre, taking effect as soon as next week.

Beyond these almost certain increases, it’s hard to predict what will happen next – because we really do find ourselves in uncharted political and financial territory. Two factors that could restrict further increases are a bounce-back in the value of Sterling, or a fall in the oil price. Crude oil has actually fallen in price today in the wake of the Brexit announcement, but it’s possible this could just turn out to be a temporary market shock.

Obviously we will keep you informed as things develop. In the meantime, one thing that’s certain is that disparities in fuel prices will widen as the increases set in, making it all the more important to shop around. You can find the cheapest fuel wherever you are by using our free service, or by downloading our new apps for Android and iOS:

Find the PetrolPrices.com iOS app here.

Find the PetrolPrices.com Android app here.

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