Neil Parish, MP for Tiverton and Honiton has accused the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) of “falling asleep” and failing in its duty to protect consumers and competition in the heating oil market.DCC plc has accumulated more than 40 heating oil distribution companies in the last ten years, such as Southern Counties Fuels and GB Oils, and five supposedly independent price comparison websites.DCC have a virtual monopoly on heating oil in some parts of the country and during the winter period of 2010 some areas saw their heating oil prices shoot up 70 pence per litre, a full 56% increase from the start of November.According to a market expert taking part in a Sunday Times investigation, DCC may control 40% to 50% of the UK’s heating oil market – whilst DCC puts the figure at 25%. This has led some commentators to question whether customers are getting a fair deal.Speaking to the Sunday Times Neil Parish said: “The Office of Fair trading is falling asleep on the job and must do more to protect customers and competition in the market place. The public are being charged artificially high prices for heating oil prices and this should now be well and truly a wake-up call to do something about.”Neil Parish has raised the matter previously in the House of Commons in December saying: “About 2 million properties rely on heating oil; they are mostly in rural areas 828,000 of them are in England. Recently, as I said, there has been a spike in oil prices that could add as much as £540 a year to the average family's heating bill. The price of heating oil tends to rise gradually in the winter months, when demand is at its highest. A home owner might use anything between 2,500 to 4,000 litres of oil. Price rises during winter are unavoidable, but the price rises that we have seen cannot be justified simply by supply and demand.”Neil Parish has written to the Minister of State at the Department for Energy and Climate Change, Charles Hendry MP, pressing him to create a heating oil adjudicator which would better able to protect consumers and competition.