Ministers want to help make drilling a shale gas well as easy as building a conservatory by making hydraulic fracking Permitted Development.

Permitted Development was intended to make it easier to do things like put up conservatories etc. This decision would by-pass local council decision-making. This is not democratic!

In the first three months of 2018, seven out of eight shale drilling applications were rejected by councils. Some were Conservative councils going against their own party’s manifesto.

Now fracking companies are taking protestors to court to try and stop our democratic right to protest.

Planning authorities are to be given £1.6m to speed up fracking applications over the next two years. Is this a bribe? And a new shale environmental regulator will be created under new government proposals.

This does not help the UK meet its obligations to reduce CO2 emissions.

This money should be being invested in energy conservation and wave, wind and hydro power instead of supporting outdated fossil fuel technologies.

In hydraulic fracking, a hole is drilled to where the shale is and huge quantities of sand, slick water and a toxic mix of chemicals is pumped underground at high pressure to ‘frack’ open small cracks to release the gas. This water is lost as a resource as it is so full of toxins, there are no financially viable processes yet to return it to its origin. Depending on geology, as much as nine millions gallons might be needed per well. In the USA the used water is left underground or in ‘ponds’ on the surface. Who knows what will happen here.

Unlike oil wells, there is not just one wellhead drilling into a kind of bubble of oil or gas. In a square mile there could be as many as 10-20 wellheads as the shale field is spread out.

As the head of the Environment Agency stated recently that we may not have enough water for our needs by 2050, how is fracking a good idea?

In 2014, Sustainable Wallingford and the Corn Exchange showed a film called Shattered Ground about fracking.

For a better explanation of shale gas fracking go to tinyurl.com/www-ecowatch-com.

Also, this link to a map of where the DECC licences were granted: frack-off.org.uk/region/south-east

Please tell your MP your feelings about fracking.

sw@sustainablewallingford.org to make a difference