Labour wants to ban fracking – while Reform wants to 'drill baby drill'. What does it mean for you?

To frack or not to frack – that is the (latest) question to divide Labour and Reform.

On Wednesday (1 October), Labour’s Ed Miliband vowed to permanently ban the shale gas extraction method, slamming Nigel Farage’s party as a “bunch of frackers”.

“Fracking will not take a penny off bills,” he told Labour’s conference. “It will not create long-term sustainable jobs. It will trash our climate commitments. And it is dangerous and deeply harmful to our natural environment.”

Reform UK, meanwhile, has pledged to “bring back” the practice. Deputy leader Richard Tice has described existing prohibitions on it as “grossly financially negligent to a criminal degree”.

“We’ve got potentially hundreds of billions of energy treasure in the form of shale gas,” he said last month.

Miliband’s speech sets up a new electoral battleground between Labour and Reform. So will voters back him – or Farage’s Trump-esque promise to ‘drill, baby, drill’?

Let’s dive into the detail.

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What is fracking, and what do people think of it?

Hydraulic fracturing – fracking for short – is a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock.

By drilling into the ground and blasting water, sand and chemicals at rock, fracking operations hope to release the gas inside.

Proponents point to the US, which lowered gas prices and therefore bills by scaling up fracking. But the UK is not America: even the founder of the UK’s first ever fracking company says so.

“It’s very challenging geology, compared with North America… heavily faulted and compartmentalised,” Chris Cornelius, the geologist who founded Cuadrilla Resources, said in 2022, adding that claims to the contrary were little more than a “political gesture”.

Bob Ward, from Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, confirmed this after Miliband’s announcement.

“Although the exact extent of economically viable reserves of shale gas in the UK is not known with certainty, the most recent assessments suggest that there is unlikely to be enough to significantly affect international prices for natural gas, and so would not reduce prices for British consumers,” he said.

The practise is also environmentally damaging and can cause minor earthquakes – so it’s been temporarily banned for years in the UK.  

David Cameron promised a “shale gas revolution” – but it was sunk by protests and planning challenges. In 2019, earthquake tremors at a fracking site led to a moratorium, which the 2019 Tory manifesto pledged to maintain.

Liz Truss lifted the ban in 2022, in a chaotic vote held the day before she resigned as prime minister, but Rishi Sunak later reinstated it.

“Making that ban permanent is a natural extension of Miliband’s policy agenda,” said Colm Murphy, lecturer in British politics at Queen Mary University of London.

“So as long as the Labor government is in power, it will never, never happen.”

What are the politics of fracking?

So why does Reform want to bring back this practise, previously condemned across the political spectrum?

It plays into broader anti-net zero political speculating, says Murphy.

“At a national level, Reform wants to challenge a wider commitment to net zero and to renewable energy, because they think these are symptomatic of a wider international agenda that is constraining the UK sovereignty and constraining its economic growth,” he explains.

“But at a local level fracking is very unpopular.”

Indeed, recent YouGov polling shows that twice as many people are opposed to fracking (50%) as support it (25%).

It’s not a vote-winner, said Tony Bosworth, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

“Reform has seriously miscalculated if it thinks people will lie down and accept such a deeply unpopular policy were it ever to get into power,” had added.

“We saw how well that worked out for Liz Truss – backing fracking was one of the key factors that led to her demise.”

Locally, he continues, it tends to be very unpopular – even in Reform council areas.

“Wherever attempts to get fracking off the ground in the UK have been made, local communities have always been in staunch opposition,” he said.

The Reform-led Lancashire County Council split with the national party on fracking last month. Fracking attempts in the county in 2011, 2018 and 2019 all caused earthquakes felt by residents.

“Fracking has its place but not everywhere in Lancashire,” said Joshua Roberts, the county council’s cabinet member for rural affairs, environment and communities. “It has a place when safety is proven but it has been proven in Lancashire not to be safe.”

The Reform-led Scarborough Town Council recently voted unanimously against Europa Oil & Gas plans for low-volume fracking (not included under the current moratorium) at a proposed gas site in North Yorkshire.

“Reform is still a very new party,” says Murphy.

“There are a lot of uncertainties that they are working out – their developed political messaging is not around fracking, but around immigration. So partly this split is a symptom of an emergent policy agenda… but also different interests at a different levels of government.”

Friends of the Earth claim that 187 constituencies are partially or totally within areas the British Geological Society has labelled “Shale Prospective Areas” – locales where specific geologic conditions exist that could make fracking viable. 

Of these constituencies, 141 are existing Labour seats, 25 are Conservative, 15 are held by the Liberal Democrats and two by Reform UK. But given that Reform is now polling higher than Labour nationwide, an election – if held tomorrow – would likely flip many of these seats teal.

Could fracking change that, drawing voters back to Labour?

“It might be sensible for Labour to try and make it a dividing line if they can, which is not entirely within their gift, because otherwise the climate dividing line will be net zero,” said Murphy. “And while public opinion is also relatively in favour of net zero in the abstract, that has become a more contentious policy issue.”

The pledge has become politically contentious. Polling by Climate Barometer in May found support for the UK’s net zero target is overwhelming among Labour voters (91%) and Liberal Democrats (82%) – and even 54% of Tory voters remain in favour. But Reform UK supporters are the outlier, with only 32% backing the target and 60% opposed.

“Fracking would be a more immediate and tangible issue than net zero,” Murphy said, “which would favour the Labour Party rather than its political opponent.”

A YouGov poll for research firm Persuasion UK earlier this month revealed that Reform’s 2024 voters are largely in favour of fracking. Just 17% of 2024 Reform voters support the ban, while 43% oppose it. Some 40% are not sure.

But crucially, this is not the case among Reform-curious voters. The same poll showed that Labour and Tory voters now considering voting Reform were more likely to say they supported the fracking ban, at 27%. Just 22% opposing the ban.

Some 27% felt strongly against new fracking licenses, compared with only 8% strongly in favour.

And it’s not just would-be Reform voters that Labour are courting. Miliband’s announcement could also stem a flow of voters to the left of the party.

“The symbolism of the fracking vote is clearly a signal to voters who are considering voting Green rather than Labour. There’s been growing awareness that, I think, among the Labour leadership, that that is a threat.”

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