The Spectator

Get fracking

Over the past week, the government has finally made a decisive move to kickstart a fracking industry in Britain. Licences have been issued for shale gas exploration and the planning process streamlined so that in future, if local councils fail to make decisions within 16 weeks, the communities secretary will step in and adjudicate.

It’s excellent news that the years of prevarication over shale seem finally to have come to a close, and greatly to the credit of our Climate Change Secretary, Amber Rudd, and Communities Secretary, Greg Clark. But the dismally slow speed at which our much-vaunted ‘shale revolution’ has taken place will end up costing this country.

The coalition liked to talk up fracking, but the truth is that they failed to make the legislative changes which were necessary to allow it to happen. In one sense, the coalition actually made things worse: by abolishing the Infrastructure Planning Commission that Labour had set up to make decisions about projects of national importance.

The folly of failing to give fracking full-hearted support became clear last month when councillors in Lancashire rejected two planning applications for fracking sites, both on the parochial grounds that they would increase lorry traffic and lead to urbanisation of a rural or semi-rural area. The Lancashire decisions were cheered by residents, and anti-fracking groups proclaimed a ‘victory for localism’. So it was. It was also a perfect example of how the creed of localism can be deeply misguided. It’s all very well to allow residents a say on the design of new housing or the size of extensions, but there’s no sense in allowing them to veto matters of national importance. To make a responsible decision about whether to sink a fracking well means balancing the economic benefit with the disruption to the local environment.

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