Fracking

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government when the moratorium on fracking will become a ban.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Northern Ireland Office (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have no plans to turn the moratorium on shale gas extraction into a ban. The Government have always been clear that we will be led by science, will continue to take a precautionary approach and will support shale gas exploration only if it can be done in a safe and sustainable way. The moratorium is intended to give a clear message to the sector and to local communities that fracking, within the current corpus of scientific evidence, will not be taken forward in England.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

The very welcome delay to carrying on with fracking means that we have to move a bit faster in reducing our dependence on gas, so will the Government ban new builds having gas central heating and perhaps look at subsidising heat pumps and renewable energy? It is all in the Green New Deal, if the Minister would like a copy.

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

The noble Baroness raises an important point. Let me stress at the beginning that we need to decarbonise, and moving from coal to the lighter hydrocarbons is one way of doing so. It has ensured that the US has met and measured its own decarbonisation very well. We will look at how to decarbonise our internal central heating processes and anticipate putting new ideas forward very soon.