Infrastructure Bill [Lords]

Andrew Percy Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Miss McIntosh]

I am sure the Minister will respond.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) put his finger on the issue before the House today. I would not stand in the way of fracking in Thirsk, Malton or Filey, which is a deeply rural constituency dependent on farming and tourism in precisely the area for which, I am told, the licence application is to be submitted in March, before the regulations have come before the House. There are too many unknowns in the regulatory regime. My question to the Minister—I have tabled a question in this connection—is which independent regulator will enforce the controls, the traffic light system which the Prime Minister refers to, stopping seismic activity above 0.5%? This is the big difference between drilling in every other aspect and causing an earthquake below ground, making the earth move, possibly never to return to where it had been before.

I would also like to raise with my hon. Friend the Minister the matter of ground water contamination. How can Third Energy hope to remove by pipes the waste water at a depth of less than 2 metres underground? How can it possibly hope to submit a plan for a licence application by the end of March without having a traffic movement plan or a waste disposal plan?

I leave the House and the Minister with the thought that in the present economic climate, given the fall in the price of oil, we can allow ourselves the luxury of making sure that the regulatory regime is independent and fit for purpose and that no fracking will take place until the regime has been tried and tested.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I had not intended to speak tonight but, having heard the debate, feel that I must contribute. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) made the important point that some of the people who are against fracking are patently against it for environmental reasons; I do not associate myself with those people, and neither does he. However, I think that many people in this country have genuine concerns about fracking. In my constituency, where there are a number of test sites, I find that many people are very reasonable, in that they would be open to the option of fracking as long as they felt that the regime was strict enough and that there were enough environmental protections in place.

What concerns me about tonight’s debate is the restricted time, our inability to vote on all the amendments, and what has happened between the Lords and the Commons with regard to what I thought we agreed in the Commons a week or so ago. It leads many people to conclude that the Government are in league with the extraction companies or that there is something to hide. I do not believe that is the case at all, but given our concerns, I think there is a very strong argument indeed for pausing and thinking again about this issue, particularly given what has happened to oil prices internationally. That is why I and other Members on both sides of the House recently voted in favour of a moratorium.

[Gregory Barker]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Andrew Percy]

I will not, because other Members are still to speak.

There is clearly the potential for fracking. I do not pretend to be a scientist—I stopped studying science when I finished my double-award GCSE at the age of 16—so I will not get into the arguments, but clearly there is the potential for an industry that a large number of my constituents would support, subject to those safeguards. That is why I voted the way I did in previous stages of the Bill’s consideration. I do not think that the way the Lords amendment has been drafted, or indeed this evening’s debate, has done a great deal to increase the confidence of residents. I make a plea to the Government that we have to take people along with us on a journey, particularly when there is a new technology that is very controversial—[Interruption.] Hon. Members say that it is not a new technology, but it is new to this country, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), so people’s concerns about it should be heard, just as concerns about wind farms should rightly be heard.

I urge the Government to think very carefully about this. I reiterate my view that the residents of Brigg and Goole and of the Isle of Asholme are not closed-minded about this technology; they simply want to know that the evidence is there to support it and that their homes, communities and local environment will be sufficiently well protected. That is what I thought we had agreed to with the amendment a couple of weeks ago.

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

I am reassured by the words of my hon. Friend the Minister, particularly with regard to groundwater protection. I think that she and the ministerial team have gone out of their way to be as consensual as possibly in order to bring the Opposition with them in support of hydraulic fracturing. Having heard the shadow Minister, who is a decent and knowledgeable man, say that he believes in a bipartisan approach, I think it is a great pity that he has chosen not to adopt such an approach tonight. He and I served on the Energy and Climate Change Committee, and it is worthy of note that the Committee has produced in this Parliament not one but two reports on fracking and shale gas.

It is also worthy of note that except for the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), not one Opposition member of the Select Committee is here tonight. That seems to suggest that the others are not particularly concerned about the proposals put forward by the Government. Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat members of the Committee all supported the importance, with safeguards, of fracturing for shale gas.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), a fellow member of the Committee, made an eloquent speech demolishing many of the myths that surround shale gas extraction. I will not attempt to reheat and rehearse most of what he said. He made a point about aquifers relative to shale layers underground. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) has worries, as have others, about the potential pollution of the water table. I think that that is almost impossible as a result of shale gas fracturing. Fracking, in and of itself, cannot cause pollution of the water table, because the shale layer is hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet below the earth’s surface, whereas the aquifers are just a few feet below the earth’s surface. In between the aquifers and the shale layer are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet of solid rock. Firing sand grains into fractures a hair’s breadth wide is not going to cause pollution of the aquifers. That will happen only if the wells themselves are compromised, and given that we have some of the best environmental protection in the world, that is very unlikely. If one drills down thousands of feet—