Miliband accused of playing into hands of Putin with plan to concrete over Britain's last gas wells
Ed Miliband has been accused of 'playing into Vladimir Putin's hands' as he waves through a plan to plug Britain's only shale gas wells with cement.
The Energy Secretary has given the green light for plans to permanently decommission the fracking sites which are said to contain enough energy to power the UK grid for decades.
But on Saturday senior parliamentarians made an eleventh hour push to save the gas reserves in Lancashire as cement mixers arrived on site.
In a letter to Mr Miliband, the collection of shadow ministers, Conservative MPs and peers and one Labour MP warned that 'in today's volatile world, we should not be abandoning Britain's natural energy assets so flippantly'.
They said the plans would weaken Britain's chances for energy independence and should be abandoned in the face of growing threats from Russia.
They described the move as 'an attempt to prevent any future Government from using these resources if they wished to do so either as a matter of policy or in an emergency'.
The North Sea Transition Authority, an arm of Mr Miliband's department, has ordered the decommissioning of Britain's two shale wells by June with work expected to begin this week.
In February 2022 an identical plan was blocked by Boris Johnson's government when Kwasi Kwarteng, the then energy secretary, intervened.
Mr Kwarteng said at the time that it ' did not necessarily make any sense to concrete over the wells'.
Yet Mr Miliband has given no indication that he will stop the process, which critics say is motivated by 'blind ideology'.
Earlier this month another giant gas field was discovered under Lincolnshire. The news prompted Mr Miliband to double down on his commitment to permanently prohibit fracking in the UK.
Lord Mackinlay, chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group and organiser of the letter, told The Telegraph: 'The recent discovery in Lincolnshire should remind people of the madness of Red Ed's sacred Net Zero.
'He is choosing to leave vast reserves of natural gas untouched at a time when our energy prices are the highest in the world.
'Salting the earth by concreting these wells shuts off a vital resource in very uncertain times, playing into Vladimir Putin's hands exactly at a time when we need to be strengthening our energy security.'
The Conservatives indefinitely banned fracking in 2019 on safety grounds following concerns about earth tremors near the gas wells.
'World is in a dangerous and unpredictable place'
During her short stint as prime minister, Liz Truss lifted the ban but it was reinstated by Rishi Sunak.
The two wells at Preston New Road, owned by Cuadrilla, were the only sites created in Britain before the ban came into force.
In their letter to Mr Miliband, the opponents of the concrete scheme said: 'We have very little idea how 2025 will pan out. The world is in a dangerous and unpredictable place. At the very least, the Government should instruct the NSTA to revoke the plugging and abandonment order, as was done in 2022.
'If this concreting order goes ahead and Britain's only shale gas wells are destroyed, the British public will be left in no doubt that this is an ideological Government that prioritises an extreme net zero agenda and ideological purity rather than this country's national security and people's bills.'
The signatories include former home secretary Suella Braverman, former deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, and the shadow ministers Greg Smith, Andrew Rosindell and Caroline Johnson.
Some 80 per cent of UK homes use natural gas for their heating. Mr Miliband is also pushing forward a transition from gas boilers with government plans to install heat pumps in all new homes by 2027.
In its manifesto, Labour said it would use 'our abundant natural resources to free ourselves from the manipulations of Vladimir Putin and petrostates'.
Francis Egan, the CEO of Cuadrilla Resources, said: 'The Energy Secretary is instructing us, at a time of heightened global volatility, to fill up Britain's only two viable shale gas wells with concrete.
'I just don't see how this is rational, not least given how much gas the UK imports and how reliant on Russian gas the EU is.
'A future government may want us to use these critical national assets so I don't think we should be making irrevocable decisions based on ideology.
'If we're serious about standing up to Putin, we should be leading Europe away from reliance on Russian gas, not pouring concrete into the British countryside.'
Despite the pleas, a spokesman for Mr Miliband's department said: 'We intend to ban fracking for good and make Britain a clean energy superpower to protect current and future generations.'
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