Lorry drivers from across the country will descend on London today to demand urgent government action on the soaring cost of fuel.

Up to 1,000 vehicles are expected to join convoys into the capital with protesters demanding a fuel-duty rebate to protect jobs in the struggling haulage industry.

As the protests began this morning, routes that the drivers will take into London were expected to be paralysed and threaten traffic chaos.

With average prices for a litre of unleaded petrol and diesel now about 114p and 126p respectively, it is not just hauliers who are feeling the strain – something that Gordon Brown acknowledged after Thursday’s by-election defeat in Crewe & Nantwich.

But organisers of today’s protest said that the rocketing price of crude oil, which reached $135 (£68) a barrel last week, had created an “urgent, immediate crisis” in the road transport industry that could soon begin costing large numbers of jobs.

“This is not just a few angry hauliers,” said Peter Carroll, a spokesman for the lobby group Transaction 2007. “This is a whole industry saying you are going to kill us and you have got the power to stop it.”

Mr Carroll, who runs Seymour Transport in Maidstone, Kent, said that his company’s fuel bill had risen by £40,000 a month since last October and other companies were suffering even more. Their problems had been aggravated by competition from foreign lorries which arrive in Britain “with tanks full of cheaper fuel”.

According to figures from the Department for Transport last week, the number of foreign-registered goods vehicles entering Britain reached a record high of 1.7 million last year.

Mr Carroll gave warning that some operators in the haulage industry could return to the blockades that brought chaos in 2000 unless the Government takes rapid action to help them to cope with rising costs.

“We don’t want to see a return to 2000 but it is possible because people are being brought to desperation,” he said. Convoys of lorries will arrive in the capital this morning. The drivers will park and then go by bus to a rally in Marble Arch.

At lunchtime, a delegation will present a letter at Downing Street, calling for the immediate introduction of an “essential user rebate” which would allow drivers of heavy goods vehicles to reclaim some fuel duty.

Part of the London-bound A40 will be closed for several hours between White City and Edgware Road in West London to allow the demonstrators to park and a diversion will be in place, but Transport for London said yesterday that it did not expect widespread traffic problems.

Roger King, the chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, said that the consequences would be dire if action was not taken to stabilise fuel prices. “You will see large numbers of businesses going to the wall. No trucks to move the goods mean no business for anybody.”

The AA estimated that the average Bank Holiday car journey cost the nation’s drivers £110 million more this year than last. Last week Edmund King, its president, wrote to Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, asking him to delay still further the 2p per litre fuel duty increase, already postponed from April to October. He said: “Prices look like they will stay high for the medium term so we are saying to the Chancellor that he should forget any idea of adding to fuel taxes in October.” A Treasury spokesman said: “The immediate priority is to encourage oil-producing countries in Opec to increase output to help bring down fuel prices.”

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