Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how much funding has been allocated to support (a) planning development and (b) processing of applications by local authorities for (i) fracking and (ii) onshore wind sites in each of the last five years.

Between March 2015 and February 2020, the Government’s Shale Support Fund, for the purpose of building capacity and capability in mineral planning authorities to deal with shale gas applications, made the following payments to mineral planning authorities: £46,173 (2015); £365,000 (2016); £123,947.42 (2017); £252,858 (2018) and £193,000 (2019). The final year of the Fund closed in February 2020.

The Department has not provided funding in relation to planning support for onshore wind applications in this time period.