The government has stopped asking the British public whether they are for or against fracking for shale gas just weeks before the first fracking operation in seven years is due to start.
The number of people against extracting shale gas has outweighed those in favour since 2015, and the latest polling by officials found 32% opposed with just 18% in support.
Now the government, which backs fracking and recently relaxed planning rules to help the shale industry, has temporarily suspended that line of questioning.
“This is scandalous as the government knows full well that there is overwhelming public opposition to fracking,” said Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labour’s shadow business secretary.
Q&AWhat is fracking?
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Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a way of extracting natural gas from shale rock formations that are often deep underground. It involves pumping water, chemicals and usually sand underground at high pressure to fracture shale – hence the name – and release the gas trapped within to be collected back at the surface.
The technology has transformed the US energy landscape in the last decade, owing to the combination of high-volume fracking – 1.5m gallons of water per well, on average – and the relatively modern ability to drill horizontally into shale after a vertical well has been drilled.
In England, the government placed a moratorium on fracking in November 2019 after protests, legal challenges and planning rejections. A year earlier, the energy company Cuadrilla was forced to stop work at its Preston New Road site in Lancashire twice in four days due to minor earthquakes occurring while it was fracking. The tremors breached a seismic threshold imposed after fracking caused minor earthquakes at a nearby Cuadrilla site in 2011. In March 2019 the high court ruled that the government's fracking guidelines were unlawful because they had failed to sufficiently consider scientific evidence against fracking.
Tony Bosworth, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “Perhaps having recently tried to change planning rules so that fracking companies could drill more easily, they were just scared of a record bad survey result for them this time, so have stopped even asking anymore.”
The question was dropped from the latest update of the four-year-old public attitudes tracker run by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Officials later confirmed the question would be asked in spring 2019 and once a year afterwards. A BEIS spokesperson said the change of approach reflected the department’s wider remit, as the polling began under the former Department of Energy and Climate Change.
The shale gas firm Cuadrilla will begin hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, within weeks at two wells between Blackpool and Preston.
The work at Preston New Road comes despite Cuadrilla being rapped by the Environment Agency for how it handled waste on the site.
In a recent warning letter, the regulator told the company it had failed to take “reasonable measures to prevent extractive waste being temporarily stored at an unpermitted site”.
On Thursday, the rival shale firm Ineos was given the planning green light to explore for shale gas at a site in Derbyshire, drawing criticism from local Tory MP, Lee Rowley, who said the decision was “simply wrong”.