Gideon calls for ban on fracking

Taunton and Wellington’s MP, Gideon Amos, has made an impassioned plea to the Government to ban fracking in "our wonderful countryside."

Fracking is a controversial technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock.

It involves drilling into the earth and directing a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals at a rock layer, to release the gas inside.

Gideon made his appeal in Parliament during a debate into the Government’s Carbon Budget, launching a broadside at Reform and the Conservatives for their support of fracking.

He told the Commons: “One thing that Reform and the Conservatives have not talked about today is that their alternatives do not just mean more and more burning of oil and gas – despite the global warming we are experiencing today – they also want to frack our beautiful countryside to burn even more gas.

“Near my constituency in Somerset, shale gas licences were obtained, including for Quantoxhead and around Brent Knoll, just 16 miles from a nuclear power station and not far at all from my town of Taunton.

“The Reform Party said that it would be negligent not to frack.

“Under their current leader, the Conservatives have recently opened the door to fracking, saying that it will form part of the mix, just as Liz Truss did during her short period in office.

“Fracking in Lancashire, let us remember, triggered 200 seismic events of magnitudes up to 2.9, which were felt across the whole Fylde coast.

“My neighbours in Taunton and Wellington want nothing to do with fracking, and certainly not just outside our town.

“Any proposals to restart fracking pose real dangers to Somerset, and constituents of Taunton and Wellington would bear all the risk: the earth tremors, the industrialisation of our rolling hills and the threat to the River Tone, while the financial gains would flow only to the oil and gas executives and to their backers.

“The Carbon Budget provides the continuity of trajectory that lower bills and a stable climate depend upon, but we must go further.

“We must reject the dangerous alternatives from the Conservatives and Reform and say no to fracking our wonderful countryside.”