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Shale Gas

My constituency is right on the edge of the latest find. I have to declare a sort of interest, because when I originally bought my house, under a 999-year lease, I found the local feudal landlords had mineral rights over my front garden. When I bought the freehold, I obviously took over those rights. My house suffers from tremors, but that is only because eight trains an hour from the Northern line go past my front door. None the less, there is a genuine concern in the area about the exploitation and extraction of shale gas. I will be visiting Cuadrilla tomorrow, coincidentally, to put to it some of the questions that will no doubt come up in this debate. When I read the report, I was delighted by its excellence and balance. It may surprise you to hear this, Mr Gale, but I do not know much about geology and oil exploration. I was extraordinarily well educated by the report. What I understand, however, is politics, which I have been in for a long time. The two motives that move people in politics are greed and fear, and both greed and fear are in play in this particular issue. On one side, pictures are sketched of a shale bonanza. The Lancashire find is put at 200 trillion cubic feet. I am reliably informed—well, informed—by a Cabinet Minister that that is almost equivalent to half the entire reserves in the USA. One ponders, I guess, why that has not dramatically affected the share value of Cuadrilla in the way that one might expect, but, none the less, it is by all acknowledgment an appreciable find. That offers the possibilities of making the UK energy-secure, of lowering energy prices and of generating wealth, although there could be an argument about how that wealth will be spread and who will benefit the most. There is no doubt that with energy comes wealth. The people buying up our premier league football teams, by and large, tend to be energy barons. That is one side of the equation. On the other side, there is not the hype, but the fear. There is the fear of environmental destruction, the fear of wells being aborted over a period of time or rather more rapidly and there is the fear of poisoned water supplies. [Interruption.] I am sure that hon. Members have seen the flaming house taps in the USA, although I wonder what the American water authorities are doing in allowing gas to contaminate—