Senior Tory: Theresa May must 'get grip' over fracking

A senior Tory MP today called on Theresa May to “get a grip” on the national debate over fracking or risk losing a chance to cut carbon, reduce energy bills and create thousands of jobs.

Robert Halfon spoke out after the Government’s fracking tsar Natascha Engel quit just seven months into her £100,000 job with a warning that official regulations were strangling the “enormous potential” of the industry with red tape. She argued that “a small but loud” green groups were driving out scientific evidence of the benefits.

“The Government need to get a grip on this,” said Mr Halfon, the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister Without Portfolio, on Talk Radio.

“This could bring thousands of jobs. It will cut energy bills and ... it is actually potentially more environmentally friendly than some other forms of energy.

“The Government really needs to listen to what Natascha Engel has done at great personal sacrifice by resigning today and not just cave in when it is politically expedient.”

In a resignation letter to Business Secretary Greg Clark, former Labour MP Ms Engel said the UK could lose out on an “energy revolution” unless it scrapped rules that were more strict than applied to other industries, including a requirement to stop work in the event of earth tremors with a magnitude of 0.5.

This morning she went on: “If you applied the standards that are being applied to fracking, you would not build another hospital, you would not build another school, you would probably not have a house-building programme.”

She told Talk Radio that opposition was driven by a “small but very vocal” group of campaigners but, in her experience, they were usually outnumbered by local businesses and residents who were “crying out for the jobs that fracking could bring”.

“I just think we need to get more rational about the debate and stop being so hysterical about scaremongering examples that don’t even exist in America.”

She said Britain spent £7 billion importing gas and went on. “The carbon footprint of liquefying the gas, putting it on a tanker, shipping it halfway across the globe, and then putting it back into our gas network here is massive compared to what we would get out of the ground here.”