18 months ago the fuel gauge suddenly stopped working, showing empty when it was nearly full. The car drove ok (just no gauge) and after a couple of weeks it started working again and has continued until 3 weeks ago. The gauge again stopped working, but within a few days it developed a slight stutter/misfire and then would start ok but then cut out 45secs later and start and stop again. RAC confirm the faults on diagnostics as no fuel and misfire due to no fuel. Car is recovered to independent garage who do their own checks which identify the same faults. They speak with Ford who suggest both fuel senders could need replacing, which is what they did. A specialist ford technician plugs in his machine, corrects the faults, so the car no longer thinks its empty 'fuel run dry scheme' (which it wasn't) and the gauge fires up showing 3/4 of a tank and all seems well. The garage use the vehicle for 2 days with no issues. They return the vehicle back and within 12hours the gauge drops to no fuel with the usual additional warning (low fuel) illuminated on the dash. It is no longer stopping/starting appearing to run ok, but not gone down the road for fear of breaking down. The expert/garage think the next stage is that there must be a bad connection somewhere but after a £1000 spent no further forward and at the moment it seems like a speculative process of elimination. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

I would think you either have a faulty tank sender unit, or bad connections to the sender unit on top of the tank which can corrode.

The unit fitted on your vehicle is a combined fuel gauge sender and also fuel pump. If there is a poor live supply to the unit you will loose the feed to the pump and the gauge.

Here is the Ford diagram labeled 9H307, part number 1902300

https://ford.7zap.com/en/car/190/code.gd,1.48332,6.49220,7.1276,10.32097/26/1562/15613/94609/#9H307

Thanks. Two new genuine Ford senders/pumps fitted so it could be the  connection as the problem is still the same as before.