asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he has any estimate of the amount of crude oil and petroleum products being traded on the spot market.

I have been asked to reply.There is no satisfactory way of estimating the volumes traded on the spot market; for instance the same cargo could be traded in the market several times. However, the trade journals suggest that recent activity has been very thin, covering probably less than 250,000 tonnes of crude per day, and perhaps 1 million tonnes of product per week.