My Lords, I must apologise to the Committee as I have not read the consultation response and so am not up on all the issues that have been looked into. I declare an interest as an owner of land in Scotland.
As we venture into this field of land at a depth of more than 300 metres and questions of ownership and interest, I just wonder whether all aspects have been looked at. One thing that is quite useful is that all coal, petroleum and so on are in the power of the Government but there is a chance that, once a shale extraction site has been established and there are large channels out under various properties, people may find that something else can be developed within that property. That might be coal gasification or something like it at deeper levels. I do not know how deep coal mines go in this country. I hope, with any luck, that they are not more than 300 metres but some coal mines are very deep indeed. One has to think of what effect establishing the shale gas network will have on other interests within the land.
I was very interested in the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, talking about the knowledge of the Environment Agency in monitoring this. In fact, it may well be that the skills that my noble friend Lord Borwick referred to in being able to detect deep drilling will become rather more vital. Presumably the Environment Agency can tell that drilling is more than 300 metres deep. It would be perfectly possible to drill a hole 300 metres deep and then put out side-feelers at less than 300 metres, saying “Oh, but we drilled to the depth we needed to”. That is where more surface problems might arise.
I guess that the question of why heat is not included in the Scottish powers is that we did not reserve heat to Westminster when we passed the Scotland Act. No doubt the Minister will tell me what the correct answer is on that. The other thing I thought of is this: supposing this network is established at great cost and somebody then does something to damage it—certainly an earthquake would damage it but you could not blame anyone for that—what rights do the owners of a shale extraction business have to their assets that are underneath other people’s property?