Fracking: “Helpful or harmful?” - public debate in Hassocks packed out

Fracking: Helpful or Harmful? - debate in Hassocks (panel, from left Nick Grealy, Alan Rew, Steve Lewis (chair), Anneliese Dodds)

There were few empty seats at the Adastra Hall as opponents, advocates and many shale gas agnostics from Mid Sussex, Crawley, Lewes and Worthing came to learn more about the possible opportunities and drawbacks of fracking.

The debate was led by Balcombe’s Professor Alan Rew (sceptic), Nick Grealy, a leading advocate of shale gas (Kingston upon Thames) and Labour MEP candidate Anneliese Dodds from Oxford, promoting her party’s case for stricter regulation.

Half of the evening was devoted to a forthright expression of views and questions from the audience.

There was no doubt that interpretations of the evidence on either side of the controversy were passionately held.

Steve Lewis, chair of Hurstpierpoint and Hassocks Labour Party, which, with Mid Sussex Constituency Labour Party, had organised the public meeting, can rarely have had a meeting to chair with emotions running so high, but he ensured that as many people as possible were able to get their views and questions heard.

Alan Rew deplored what he described as the ‘ideologically driven’ pro-fracking agenda of the Coalition Government, accompanied by an ‘exaggerated’ account of its benefits from ministers. Fracking’s ‘soothsayers’, he continued, claiming that wells would stay safe, ignored evidence that 30% of them failed, causing potentially dangerous leaks, within ten years.

Not so, Nick Grealy replied, claiming that the great majority of the 80 world-wide investigations of fracking on his website - www.nohotair.co.uk - uphold the view that the technique is safe and yields gas that reduces fuel bills (as in the USA).