Fracking

In one of his first moves as Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has moved to overturn last week's vote by MPs to lift a long-standing ban on fracking in the UK.

The Government also confirmed that its economic plan to be unveiled in the next fiscal update would be pushed back to 17 November. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has recommended keeping the ban in place to support an orderly net-zero transition. The motion was defeated by 326 votes to 230, in a move that saw the Conservative Government abandon one of the key pledges of its victorious 2019 election manifesto. Sunak also noted that the nation would deliver on its commitments made at COP26 and continue towards the net-zero target for 2050. The Conservative Government imposed a moratorium on fracking in 2019 because companies leading extraction projects could not prove their ability to operate below a threshold for tremors they had previously agreed to. It remains unclear what the official Government ruling on fracking will be in this regard.