Fracking

Mark Menzies Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mark Menzies (Fylde) (Con)]

I noted your earlier comments about the time, Mr Gray, so I will make my speech brief.

My constituency has lived with shale gas and fracking for the past five years. Indeed, three of the sites that have been drilled in Lancashire are in my constituency, and the two that are seeking planning permission from Lancashire county council are also in my constituency. The well at Preese Hall, which has been mentioned today, is also in Fylde.

I will keep my comments to regulation and some of the work that has happened during this Parliament. In a debate earlier in this Parliament, I called for the establishment of a body that could oversee the operation and regulation of shale gas in this country, and from that the Office of Unconventional Gas and Oil emerged. At the time, I hoped that that body would be able to interrogate the regulations, look at the work of the regulators and set about putting a process in place that delivered public confidence in relation to the regulation of oil and gas onshore activity.

I am disappointed with where we are, several years on, because the public perception is still very much that the regulatory function is not up to speed with the challenges of onshore oil and gas activity, whether shale or other unconventional oil and gas methods. That provides the Minister with an opportunity to look at the current work of the Office of Unconventional Gas and Oil, to turn a skeleton organisation into something that is far better resourced, far more robust and able to fulfil its six founding criteria, one of which was to enable development, protect the environment and safeguard the public. On that point in particular, I do not think that the work has been done with regard to the public perception argument or the regulatory oversight argument.

There is an opportunity to create an independent panel of experts—not another regulatory body or function—to consider the work of the regulators, interrogate the regulations that are in place from an independent perspective and ensure that the Health and Safety Executive, the Environment Agency, the Department of Energy and Climate Change, county councils and mineral rights authorities are working and have no gaps in their work. The people who sit on this body, which has to be funded by the Government, should be independent from the Government, and the application process to join such a body must be fair, open and transparent. At the moment, the perception of many people out there is that, although the regulatory function may be technically robust from an industry perspective, there are gaps. Only by creating a new panel of experts, as I have outlined, with some speed will we have an opportunity to try to address that matter.

Specifically in relation to Preese Hall and environmental monitoring, I believe that Lancashire county council suggested that the Environment Agency take on a minimum five-year process to conduct monitoring at Preese Hall, only to be told that, as a mineral rights authority, it did not have the power to enforce that decision. The Environment Agency appeared reluctant to take on the environmental monitoring facility and left it to Cuadrilla. I am not casting any aspersions on Cuadrilla’s integrity or the independence of its monitoring, but the public need to know that any monitoring is being done by an independent body, not by a company involved in the process. That is where the Environment Agency needs to step up to the mark. There has to be an obligation on it to provide all such environmental monitoring. To ask the company or companies involved to fulfil that role or task is unacceptable and does nothing to help public confidence; indeed, it is undermining the robustness of the regulations we are putting in place in the view of those people in favour of shale gas.

I have a final request for the Minister. If the Government have to put in additional resource and people into the environment and the regulatory process to advise local authorities on details of planning applications, for example, we must be prepared to do that, because if we do not Members of Parliament such as myself will find it difficult to support this process going forward. We will not allow anything to take place in our constituencies where regulation is not robust and inspections are not independent and are not unannounced, because anything short of that will really start to test the good will of MPs such as me and my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw).