The Met Police have spent £83,858 over the past three years fixing wrongly fuelled cars!
According to newly released figures following a Freedom of Information request by the MailOnline, the Metropolitan Police have spent over £80,000 in the past three years after officers filled their cars with the wrong fuel.
In total, £83,858 has been spent on fixing cars because an officer has mistakenly filled up with the wrong type of fuel.
Apparently, on each police car the fuel flap tells the officer which type of fuel the vehicle requires, whether it’s petrol or diesel but despite this, over the past three-and-a-half years, the Met Police have forked out £83,858 on cars with damaged engines that need repairing.
The figures revealed that police officers had filled their cars with the wrong type of fuel a staggering 242 times within a three-and-a-half year period.
The Met Police have spent £83,858 over the past three years fixing wrongly fuelled cars! © Copyright Lewis Clarke and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
This revelation shows how much of taxpayers money is wasted still despite the force being asked to reduce their £3.5billion budget by £800m within the next two years.
The wastage has been criticised by the Chief Executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance John O’Connell, who said that not only do these kind of mistakes mean there’s less vehicles sat waiting for officers to use but there’s also less money available for frontline policing which is essential.
“The number of incidents in which vehicles were filled with the incorrect fuel are a tiny proportion of the hundreds of thousands of times the vehicles were refuelled during this time period,” said a spokesman for the Met Police.
According to their spokesman, the rate of misfuelling incidents is decreasing year on year.
A survey back in 2012 found that filling up your car with the wrong kind of fuel cost motorists in the UK around £150 million every year.
On average, a person puts the wrong fuel in their car every one minute and 45 seconds, which equates to around 300,000 vehicles needing to be repaired each year. Fixing a car after diesel was put into a petrol tank or vice versa can cost anywhere from £500 to £3,000 to fix, with only half of car owners being able to make a claim through their insurers.
According to industry experts, mistakenly putting the wrong fuel in could be down to the increase in the number of motorists swapping over to more economical diesel cars.
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