Homeowners will no longer be individually notified of plans to drill under their homes, as part of changes that Lords suggest received inadequate public consultation and parliamentary scrutiny. As with most of what this Government are doing, they have no mandate via the election process to do so, nor are they being open and honest with the public about what their plans really mean.
In a separate piece of legislative game playing, the Government intends also to legislate to reform the trespass laws to make it easier for fracking to take place without actually requiring homeowners’ consent in the first place.
In the future, the first a homeowner will know of fracking having taken place beneath their properties may well be when they come to sell their property and find that its value has suddenly taken a nose-dive as a consequence of the damaging and foundation destabilising burrowing that has gone on under their property!
Further, the risk of contamination to their homes from leaked water, gas and chemicals during the fracking process cannot be ruled out.
Last week, the Daily Telegraph reported on this issue:
Ministers rushed through pro-fracking planning reforms without proper scrutiny and despite overwhelming opposition, a Lords committee has found.
Under the reforms, which came into force as secondary legislation earlier this month, homeowners will no longer be individually notified of a planning application by an energy company seeking to drill or frack beneath their home.
Opponents fear the change, which still requires final parliamentary approval, could lead to fracking taking place without homeowners’ knowledge.
Nick Boles, the planning minister, said in December that having to notify every homeowner was “unnecessarily excessive” and instead, companies would only be “required to publish a notice in a local newspaper and put up site displays in local parishes”.
A Lords committee has now urged the Lords to look again at the reforms, raising a series of “shortcomings” with how they were rushed through and suggesting the policy had not been “adequately thought through” and may be “imperfectly achieve their policy objectives”.
The same news item went on to warn:
Opponents to the changes included NGOs, local authorities and individuals who “felt that the proposal would risk landowners being left unaware of any subsurface activity on land which they owned, and who also considered that the proposal could hasten or abet acts of trespass”, the report said.
Giving an account of the dishonesty of this government and it’s policy of removing all barriers to wholescale fracking of the UK by a French company, banned from doing such a thing in France; the news item ,explained the process used by the Tory-led coalition government:
Public consultation on the changes went on for just six weeks - half the time that the government’s own guidelines suggest would have been appropriate for a “new and contentious” policy such as procedures related to fracking, the Lords secondary legislation scrutiny committee said.
Planning ministers then laid the ‘order’ to introduce the changes before Parliament on December 20, while MPs were away on Christmas holiday, and brought it into force on January 13, a week after they came back, giving “scant opportunity” for scrutiny.
“Given that ‘fracking’ is a highly controversial technique, and that the order streamlines procedures for notifying interested parties whose land may be affected by the technique, we find it regrettable that the opportunity for Parliamentary scrutiny was curtailed in this way,” the committee said.
But ministers failed to disclose to Parliament the scale of opposition to the changes in the public consultation, which saw seven responses in favour and 155 against.
The report notes that the National Trust said that notification of landowners was “an important principle underpinning the balance of interests which is struck by the planning regime” but finds that “[the Department of Communities and Local Government]’s intentions were not influenced by such points”.
Shale gas industry body the UK Onshore Operators Group claimed at the time that the reform would not lead to fracking taking place under homes without their owners’ knowledge because companies were still required to negotiate land access with the individuals under separate trespass laws.
Continuing, the article alerts readers to this fact:
Another change brought in by the planning reforms was to alter the level of fees companies had to pay for their planning application to be processed.
It meant that the planning fees were calculated only in relation to the above-ground area – and therefore were much lower than if they had covered the entire are of the underground drilling.
Opponents to the change were concerned that “the level of fees were insufficient to cover the cost of dealing with complex and contentious issues, including underground elements they considered relevant to planning”.
The committee found that DCLG’s impact assessment – which was not presented to Parliament – acknowledged this concern but that DCLG had not properly assessed the impact on public authorities of the change.
The article concludes with a Government spokesperson being quoted and using the same ‘forked-tongue language designed to mislead and deceive the public from the true and intended consequences of their actions:
A spokesman for DCLG said: “We disagree with these [the Lords’] comments. The Government has publicly consulted on these small, technical reforms, which are designed to provide clarity to councils and the shale industry, and ensure that the public are properly informed of any local planning application.”
Source: Unionsafety / The Telegraph
