Shale Gas

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) on an extremely well balanced speech. All discussion about the energy industry is fraught, because it tends to deal not only with the detail, but with people’s particular ideological positions.

In the time available, I will make two major points. The first is that this country is at a particularly critical moment in its economic history. The energy policy that we have had for the past seven or eight years—putting up the price of energy by moving to intermittent renewable sources, which has increased people’s bills—has had two unfortunate consequences: not only the price going up, but the deindustrialisation of the country, as industry has moved elsewhere in the world. As a result, although the policy objective is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the overall carbon footprint of the country has increased. The policy has been a mistake. We now have a big decision to make on runway capacity in the south-east—which I will not talk about, Mr Howarth—as well as on fracking. All those decisions are critical for our country’s future wealth.

On fracking, there are two intellectually coherent arguments. I understand people from the green lobby who say—this often invades the discussion without being explicitly stated—that we should leave all fossil fuels in the ground forever, because we have already taken enough out. I do not agree, but it is intellectually coherent for people to say that. The argument that I support is that we need to look at every possible energy source for this country’s energy future. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) that we should look at green gas, and we should also put more money into research, because at the moment renewables cannot compete with the energy-intensity available from fossil fuels.

In the meantime, we also need to be developing shale gas. There is a case against and a case for, but there is not a case for pretending that we do not know or for simply kicking the can down the road and saying, “Oh, we’ll have a moratorium,” as some of the candidates in the competition for the leadership of the Labour party are doing. We have to make a decision about such things, and I think we should go for shale gas. More than 1 million wells have been drilled in north America. All those wells that have complied with the safety regulations—which are not as tough as the regulations that this country will have—have been drilled without any problems. The scare films are often about areas where the issues might not be to do with fracking, as it turns out, or where, if fracking is involved, the rules have not been followed. We have to go for it.

We have heard from two Conservative Members about the normal planning concerns that one gets—about the amount of road usage and what will happen to an area. Those are obviously genuine local concerns, but as a country we have to decide on the balance between those people with genuine local concerns and what is part of the national infrastructure plan. There is nothing unusual about that: when the country was cabled, the amount of local cabling decisions that could be taken were reduced. Shale gas is of such importance that we should have a national infrastructure plan.

I will finish with the final point made by the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton. Rumours are sometimes put about wilfully by those who are ideologically opposed to fracking, so the worst thing that any Government can do, whether a Conservative or Labour one, or a coalition, is to hide information. We need to get as much information out there as possible, because fracking is safe and water will not travel through half a mile of rock. People need to be reassured about that and, by reassuring them, we are much more likely to get the economic benefits of a real shale gas industry.