Reaction to Labour Party's decision to promote a bill to ban fracking in Scotland

4 November 2016

In reaction to the decision by Claudia Beamish MSP, Labour’s environment spokesperson in the Scottish Parliament, to propose a Members’ Bill to ban fracking in Scotland, Ken Cronin, chief executive of UKOOG, said:

“We find it hard to understand why Labour, a party set up to represent ordinary working people, would not want to work with the industry to create jobs, provide significant benefits to our communities, improve our energy security and find solutions to our future heating and other energy needs rather than introducing a bill which is clearly politically designed to set one party against another.

“The process set out by the Scottish Government to have a research phase and then a public consultation was welcomed by all sides in the debate. Scotland is the birth place of oil and gas exploration onshore which has been conducted safely for many decades under a strict regulatory regime.  Four out of five Scottish households use gas for heating and thousands of jobs are sustained by taking gas and making it into products that we all use every day. The climate change impact of exporting our gas needs from countries that have much lower environmental and human rights record rather than producing our own is quite clear.”