CPRE Sussex director gives evidence at House of Commons fracking inquiry

In April 2018 CPRE Sussex submitted written evidence to the House of Commons Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee inquiry on Planning guidance for fracking. On 30 April 2018 the CPRE Sussex director, Kia Trainor, gave oral evidence to the Committee.

The arguments in our written evidence included that current guidance should be updated and improved because:

• it requires planners to give great weight to the benefits of hydrocarbon extraction, but offers inadequate guidance on how they should weigh that against environmental priorities, or play an active part in implementing the Government’s climate change agenda;

• Government guidance assumes that the claimed benefits of shale gas and shale oil extraction are the same, but they are not;

• planners have no guidance for applications involving acidisation techniques that do not meet the statutory definition of hydraulic fracturing.

You can listen to CPRE Sussex’s director at the parliamentary inquiry by setting the inquiry video to a start time of 17.12.50.

The recommendations in the inquiry report included that particular attention should be paid to how fracking sits with the UK’s commitments to climate change in order to make clear to Mineral Planning Authorities how they can balance competing objectives, and respond to the public’s concerns. The Government’s response to the report is still awaited.