Neil Parish
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Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) for securing this debate and for the balanced way in which he presented his case, as others have noted.
If I put my national hat on—and given that I am a Member of Parliament for Tiverton and Honiton down in Devon, where at the moment there is no notion that there will be fracking—it is easy for me to say that it is good for the country to have a great gas supply, so we must make sure that we get on with fracking. From the national perspective, that is absolutely right, but as a Government, we are keen on taking local people with us, and—dare I say it—at the moment we do not seem to be doing terribly well on that. All the locals are turning fracking down. We are going to have to rethink our approach to all this. We have to make sure that we do not simply talk about a sovereign fund that might help local people. We must be much more up front. How does an industry like fracking help local people? They have to see something tangible before they buy into it.
If I put on the hat of Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, we of course are concerned about our land, food production and groundwater. In the previous Parliament, the Committee was assured that when fracking takes place the water used is well beneath groundwater sources and the area from which we extract water to purify for drinking water—but is that the case? I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) that we cannot simply have a blanket licence from the Environment Agency; each case has to be looked at individually.
Putting my Conservative hat on, I want to make sure that we are competitive and have an efficient industry. In this case, we must have an industry that extracts the gas—that is absolutely right. We still use an awful lot of gas and will still do so in future; if we do not use Russian gas, someone else will, so the gas we can extract for home consumption has to be good, but that gas should not be brought out of the ground at any price. If we need to put in more pipelines, reduce lorry movements and improve roads in villages and other areas where there are proposals for help with infrastructure, we have to do so. I was a Member of the European Parliament for 10 years, so everything in Europe is my fault—I just put that on the record. I look at the French: now, I do not always agree with the French, but I acknowledge that when it comes to exploiting resources, they put in all the infrastructure necessary for local people’s lives to be enhanced.
I say to the Minister, who is a very good Minister, that we must make sure that local people buy into fracking much more than they are doing at the moment. If we are going to stick to our principle that local people decide—I think we should—we are going to have to reassure them a great deal more about environmental safety, especially on water, and make sure that fracking is properly monitored. In evidence to our Committee, the Environment Agency said it had the capability to do that, but people need to be reassured that that is the case and that the agency will not be overstretched.
Another problem is that, while all of us can be experts beforehand on whether the gas will or will not come out, we cannot know until we have a number of wells in place whether the ground will actually give up the gas. We know the gas is there, but we are not certain that it can be got out. We may not, in the end, be able to produce the gas we expect, although we may be able to produce a lot more, which is very exciting.
There must be a balance: as we move forward, we must take local people with us, reassure them about the environmental position and reduce the number of lorry movements by piping more gas, however expensive that may be. In that way, the local population will, in the end, be able to buy into these projects, and our green and pleasant countryside will remain green and pleasant. We have a large population, and we want to keep our green spaces and our food production.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Is not the problem that we are taking a piecemeal approach to licensing exploration, as opposed to a strategic approach that looks at the real impact the industry will have across our land?
Neil Parish
The hon. Lady makes a good point, which I am sure the Minister will address.
I will leave my comments there, because others want to speak, and it is right that everybody has a chance to debate this issue. Again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton.