Fracking Ban

Debate between Alex Sobel and Claire Young

Tuesday 15th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Claire Young]

I would like to clarify that. I am not suggesting that we should measure and judge these things by seismicity, because that is not something that can be predicted in advance. The point is that in one case fossil fuels are being extracted, but that is not the effect with geothermal—it is a different process with a different effect.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley) (Lab/Co-op)]

North Yorkshire council’s planning committee rejected the Burniston site that the hon. Lady has mentioned not just on seismicity grounds, but because of issues of groundwater pollution, traffic and a whole range of other issues. Although these low-level fracking sites are technically legal, they still have a range of issues for us to deal with.

[Claire Young]

I quite agree. The hon. Gentleman better explains the point that I was trying to make, which is that other issues, such as the potential for groundwater contamination, are different in the situation of fracking for fossil fuels.

Ministers tell us that the evidence base is not there to show that lower-volume fracking carries the same risk as fracking for shale gas, but I say gently to the Government that the evidence is there, and it is sitting in their own records. The earthquake at Preston New Road that triggered the 2019 moratorium did not follow some enormous injection, but a series of lower-volume stages, every one of which was below the legal threshold. The tremor that shook Lancashire, felt across the area at a magnitude of 2.9, came in the days after a stage that used just 142 cubic metres of fluid. The then Oil and Gas Authority concluded that it was not possible to predict the timing or size of these events. The volumes proposed at Burniston were higher than the volume that caused that earthquake.

This matters well beyond seismicity. It matters for our countryside and for the rural communities and protected landscapes that would host this drilling and gain almost nothing in return. It matters for our waters, as has already been mentioned; parts of Yorkshire were under a hosepipe ban in 2025, yet we are asked to pump scarce water deep underground and accept the risk of contaminating the aquifers that families and farms depend on. It matters for the climate, too. Every new source of onshore gas means more methane, more emissions and a direct collision with the carbon budgets that this House has voted for—not to mention our net zero ambitions.

There are voices—Reform Members among them—who say that the answer to high bills is to return to fossil fuels and to frack our way out of trouble. I understand the appeal of a simple answer, but it is the wrong one. Gas is priced on an international market. Drilling a handful of wells in the English countryside would not move that price, and the companies doing the drilling would sell at whatever the market pays. Fracking would not take a single pound off a family’s bill. What it would do is divide communities, tie up local councils in years of planning battles and lock us into the very fuel whose price swings caused the crisis in the first place. We would be more exposed, so I question their intentions.