Ed Miliband has announced that the government is to speed up its plans to permanently ban fracking in the UK, in order to counter the Reform party’s promises to bring back the controversial practice.
The energy secretary said he would put forward legislation as part of the North Sea transition plan which is to be published this autumn. This means that in order to allow fracking, a future government would have to repeal the legislation with a parliamentary vote.
This would be very difficult, as it means the government would have to gain the votes of MPs whose constituencies sit on shale gas. Miliband used his speech at the Labour conference to say the party will send campaigners to nearly 200 constituencies to “send the frackers packing”.
A permanent ban on fracking had been a key pledge in Labour’s election manifesto and had been reaffirmed by Miliband earlier this year, but Wednesday’s announcement laid out how the government would bring in the legislation.
Miliband said he would legislate to ban fracking “at the earliest opportunity” to protect the 187 constituencies that sit above shale gas areas from drilling.
There is a moratorium on the controversial energy extraction method, which involves drilling deep into the earth then shooting at high speed a mixture of sand, water and chemicals to dislodge shale gas.
Reform UK supports fracking across Britain, but it is unpopular as it causes earthquakes. The last time fracking was tried in the UK, at Preston New Road in Lancashire, it resulted in nearly 200 earthquakes in less than a year.
There have already been fractures in Reform over the fracking issue, with Lancashire council, which is under Reform control, saying it would not welcome drilling in the area. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, and deputy, Richard Tice, have both backed the fracking and said it would bring down bills, a claim widely debunked by experts.
The Liz Truss government collapsed in 2022 after Miliband, then shadow energy secretary, forced a vote to ban fracking during an opposition day debate. Truss attempted to whip her MPs to vote for fracking, and many rebelled, causing chaos.
Tice and Farage have tried to draw comparisons with the success of fracking in the US, but the high population density in the UK and different geology means that there is a greater chance of disruption and earthquakes, and it is harder to extract gas because the shale resource in the UK is heavily faulted and compartmentalised.
