Fracking represents a transformative shift in UK energy policy. The coalition government has extolled it as one of the potential solutions towards achieving abundant and cheap energy.
Fuelled by what has happened in the United States, there is a clear appetite for UK PLC to get in on the benefits.
The Prime Minister has endorsed it publicly, claiming that any opposition is irrational.
Furthermore, there are government proposals to ensure that communities and local authorities benefit from 100% of business rates increases by allowing fracking ‘in their backyard’.
This blog examines the dangers of making significant and hasty policy changes without providing the necessary information and consultation processes to the public over its potential effects and impacts.
The United Nations, Aarhus Convention applies here and should be familiar to all our elected politicians. Unfortunately, it is not and I suspect that very few readers have ever heard of it, but the UK is a signatory.
It requires governments and authorities to ensure that the public have the necessary right to participate in environmental decision-making with effective consultations on policy, plans, projects and programmes that impact on the environment.
This imposes obligations on decision makers to ensure that the necessary information is in the public domain; that good consultation has occurred and the public views have been used.
Crucially the public have a legal right to challenge if this has not occurred.
Environmental justice is a core component of Aarhus, as it should be given the impacts of decisions on people and their communities.
This might be seen to some as yet another unnecessary and bureaucratic imposition on our policy and decision-making.
However, making a significant energy policy shift subject to wider public consultation and participation seems to me entirely sensible.
Hence, the current presumption in favour of shifting energy policy towards fracking in the absence of any proper information and public consultation over its impacts is astonishing.
It also raises serious questions about the influence of lobbying in the manner in which government ministers have queued up to support it and deride any opposition.
This reflects a wider critique of this government on the way they make policy whether it be in planning, education, legal aid, probation and welfare. The same ingredients seem to be present; a minister bent on reform, little consultation, much haste and condemnation of objectors.
This haste is not just confined to the present government. The previous labour government fell victim to breaches of the Aarhus Convention when they tried to get a national policy statement on nuclear power through without providing enough time for consultation. The process had to be rerun.
So my argument is that the government have made a significant energy policy change. There has been no public consultation yet they have proposed incentives to cash-strapped local authorities to allow fracking to happen.
Political statements have made it clear the government view the case for fracking as unassailable with protesters as the enemies of enterprise. Thus the politics point towards acceptance by government and its supporting agencies such as Natural England and Environment Agency.
Now I am not an objector or supporter of fracking.
I am however keen to see a coherent energy policy based on good evidence and debate rather than on the simplistic presumptions of cheap and abundant energy and jobs on the one hand or environmental catastrophe on the other.
I am keen that the public have a chance to look at evidence and influence the debate before we move to individual sites in the planning process as the planning system does not allow wider strategic issues over the case for fracking to figure in those decisions.
This will come as a shock to some. It will only consider the impacts in those places alone.
So my plea to this government is for the Aarhus Convention to be respected with a proper consultation process over fracking where the spatial, economic, social and environmental implications are informed by evidence and the consultation shapes an effective policy response.
If that delays matters then so be it as the present debate between the frackers and the frack ‘offers’ is little more than a pantomime and that is not the way to win arguments over complex resource issues.
