CBI supremo blasts Brown, claiming business has lost confidence in his tax policies

Britain risks energy shortages and power cuts unless the Government takes urgent action to wean the country off oil, business chief Richard Lambert warned today.

In a scathing assessment of Labour's handling of the economy, the CBI director-general also said the Government had lost the confidence of the business community over tax policy and the Treasury did not have the experience to hadle a slow-down.

Mr Lambert, a former FT editor who famously got the newspaper to back Labour in the 1992 general election, told the Evening Standard that the Tories were "working very hard" to reflect business concerns and that shadow chancellor George Osborne was a "very good listener".

Amid Downing Street pleas for motorists not to panic-buy their petrol - and a threat by Shell petrol tanker drivers to stage a four-day walk-out over pay - Mr Lambert said ministers had to act now to prevent the UK from an energy crisis in eight years' time.

He said more nuclear power plants, wind farms and clean coal power stations were vital, adding: "South Africa didn't make key decisions on power and eight years later they've got shortages and cuts.

We will face the same in 2016 if we don't do something now. We face big decisions about power generation and we must take them."

Mr Lambert pointed out that soaring energy prices were "reducing the possibility of interest rate cuts" and would squeeze household incomes further this year. He said: "This is going to be a difficult year, in every sense, for the Government.

"The outlook for the next 18 months looks worse than it did three months ago because energy prices are reducing the possibility of interest rate cuts, and they are adding extra pressure to household bills and squeezing profit margins."

On business taxes, he added: "The Government has lost it on business tax, with capital gains, non-doms and so on. Let's have clarity and consistency  -  businesses care about that as much as the headline rate."

Last-ditch talks to prevent a walk-out by Shell petrol-tanker drivers are being held today. More than 500 drivers are threatening to go on strike for four days from Friday morning if their pay demands are not met.

The action would affect around one in 10 of the country's 9,500 filling stations. The Government warned that shortages at some stations would be "inevitable".

The disputes comes as one of the world's most powerful oil company bosses warned that the oil price could double again "in the foreseeable future" to $250 a barrel pushing the price of a litre of petrol close to £2.

The Shell delivery drivers are employed by two haulage companies, Hoyer UK and Suckling Transport. Their union Unite claim that basic pay rates of around £32,000 have not increased since 1992.

There are fears that if the talks  -  at an undisclosed location  -  break down the dispute could spread to other companies, bringing about more widespread petrol shortages.

If the walk-out goes ahead it will complete an extraordinary seven days in the energy markets, which started with the biggest ever-one day spike in the oil price to just under $140 a barrel.

However, in a speech in France yesterday Alexey Miller, the head of the Russian gas giant Gazprom, went beyond even the most pessimistic forecasts with his prediction of a $250-a-barrel price driven by rising demand. Diesel prices hit a new record high of

130.33p a litre yesterday and petrol reached 116.9p a litre.