THE first interim report of the Task Force on Shale Gas, whose recommendations were published in the Gazette & Herald on March 25, should be approached with due care and thought.

Firstly, the Task Force is self-confessedly funded by the industries which seek to explore and, they trust, extract shale gas reserves. This alone should urge caution in considering its recommendations despite its avowed independence in approaching the areas examined.

Secondly, it will not escape the reader that the Task Force’s study is conducted against the background of a government already committed to the recovery of a goodly proportion of this fossil fuel if it can be demonstrated to be economically viable.

Thirdly, and perhaps consequentially, this study does not deal with environmental concerns other than those perceived to be local. We must wait until September for its consideration of fracking and the climate change issue.

This report really seeks to address the question: How can inevitable fracking more efficiently benefit the UK?

The report, unsurprisingly therefore, seeks to streamline the present cumbersome planning process in proposing a single regulator. The function of this regulator would be to streamline the progress of a planning application, the more efficiently to maximise the speed and size of profits for the industry regardless of those concerns of environmentalists which argue persuasively that new forms of fossil fuels should on no account be exploited if climate catastrophe is to be avoided.

My fear is that this Task Force interim report is an attempt at obfuscation.

What superficially seems a good idea to improve the transparency of the planning process, does little more than obscure the real issues; local “Yes” but much, much more than local. Will the three reports to come be able, in view of the huge power of the corporate polluters, to do anything other than take fracking as a fact of UK life. Is the Task Force free to do anything else?

David Cragg-James, Stonegrave