Rip Off Van Winkle - Fuel Crisis Forces 60-Year-Old Builder To Sleep In His Van

Pic: Daily Mail

We told you so! 


Just days after chancellor George Osborne's 'too little, too late' cut to fuel duty, an ordinary builder has illustrated the desperate impact petrol prices are having on British business. 


Dennis Stapleton is sleeping in his cramped van four nights a week instead of travelling the 63 miles from his current workplace in Hertfordshire to his three-bedroom home in Cambridgeshire at the end of each day.


He leaves his house on a Monday morning with a week's worth of clothes and returns home after work on a Friday. He showers at a nearby service station and parks his van on an industrial estate at night.


Stapleton, who is 62, reckons he saves £600 a month by crashing out amidst his tools. 

"It's uncomfortable, but at the moment I have to find a means to survive," he told the Daily Mail. 'It's very cold. I get changed as quickly as possible in the morning and jump into my sleeping bag as quickly as I can at night.'

As we wrote last week, Osborne's cut of 1p off petrol and freezing of future changes until next year, was immediately wiped out by the garages who simply squeezed forecourt prices up. And it means that stories like that of Mr Stapleton, will become more and more common.

Of course, even he could benefit from a device like iBox's 'Eco-mate'. The tracking device can save businesses thousands of pounds in fuel bills each year by providing live and downloadable reports on fuel usage, efficiency, idling time and harsh braking patterns.

We might send him a free unit to see if it can shave something off his bill and allow him to sleep in a decent bed more often.