A steady stream of despondent young men are filtering out of a job centre in the market town of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, on Thursday afternoon.
Alex Malone, 32, an out-of-work scaffolder and fabricator, says he has been job-hunting in earnest for almost a year now. ‘There are so few jobs in this town,’ he says. ‘It’s almost impossible.’ Malone was born here, but now he sees friends he grew up with turn to crime just to feed their families.
Nearby, a pedestrianised street leading to the old market square is littered with shuttered shops. It is deathly quiet.
Small businesses here have faced numerous challenges since the pandemic, chief among them soaring energy bills.
Michael Storr, 42, who runs The Meat Storr butcher’s shop, says his bill has doubled from £600 a month when he opened six years ago, to £1,300 – and he has already fallen £3,500 in arrears. ‘It’s not sustainable,’ he says. ‘Unless we get some help with it, we’re going to see a lot more closures.’
In this, Gainsborough is not alone. It is a typical tale of a historic market town that has fallen on hard times. And it is far from the worst.
But now there is a glimmer of hope for revival. Earlier this month, it was revealed residents here could be sitting on a potential goldmine or, to be precise, a giant gas field.
The site at Gainsborough Trough – a geological feature that has long been suspected of holding major fossil fuel resources – holds at least 480 billion cubic metres of recoverable gas, according to the energy firms who want to extract it.
If drilled, it could fuel the UK’s entire energy needs for seven years, slash bills by reducing dependence on gas imports and generate tens of thousands of jobs, it is claimed.
This ‘if’, however, is a big one. Because it involves fracking, the process of extracting gas by pumping ultra-high pressure liquid underground to crack the bedrock, it is a non-starter under Labour.
Ed Miliband responded to the discovery of this vast gas field by doubling down on his vow to ban the practice ‘for good’ over environmental concerns. A few days later, the Energy Secretary waved through a plan to concrete over the country’s only shale gas wells, in Lancashire. But it is a stance his critics say is becoming untenable – and in which he is becoming increasingly isolated.
Gas production in the US has risen by 186 per cent in the past decade, with much of the increase accounted for by improvements in fracking techniques. As a result, industrial gas prices are four times lower than in the UK, while domestic costs are less than half.
Many in Gainsborough would like the same. And when the Mail visited this week, we found growing resentment over the fact that Miliband’s intransigence could see a golden opportunity for regeneration pass them by.
If local legend is to be believed, Gainsborough is the place where King Canute attempted to turn back the tide, possibly at the River Trent that flows alongside the town. The myth has come to symbolise the limit of a king’s power. When Canute ordered the tide to stop, it continued to rise and wet his feet. The king, it is said, had thus proved to courtiers that he could not control nature – and that only God is all-powerful.
Miliband is learning a similar lesson about rising energy bills. During the election campaign, he pledged that his controversial plan to decarbonise the electricity system by 2030 would reduce household bills by £300.
Instead, following a further hike announced by regulator Ofgem this week, they have climbed by an average of £281 since Labour took power – and the forecast is that they will, like the tide, keep on rising. If Canute got his feet wet, King Ed is knee deep.
Despite the growth of renewables, the UK is still reliant on natural gas to generate a third of its electricity, while 25 million homes rely on it to power the gas boilers that provide their heat and water.
Currently, we consume about 75 billion cubic metres of the stuff every year. But waning North Sea supplies means Britain now imports about 30 billion cubic metres of gas annually from Norway with another 15 billion arriving as liquefied natural gas, predominantly from the US and Qatar. This left us particularly exposed to global price rises caused by the Ukraine conflict. When Miliband told builders to plug the fracking sites in Lancashire this week, he was accused by Tory and Reform MPs of ‘playing into Putin’s hands’.
It is not as though Britain lacks the resources to solve this. There are already plenty of known shale gas reserves, particularly in the huge Bowland basin in the North and Midlands, estimated to hold up to 400 billion cubic metres.
The Lincolnshire gas field lies under sparsely populated rural land centred around Gainsborough and extending west towards Sheffield and north towards Miliband’s own constituency in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.
An economic assessment by the City-based consultancy Deloitte found it could add up to £112billion to GDP and yield £27billion in direct taxation. It also claimed CO2 emissions would be 218 million tonnes lower if Britain weaned itself off imported gas.
But as it stands, this will all remain untapped. In Gainsborough, this is the source of considerable frustration.
Any assumption that fracking is fiercely opposed by local communities, due to the risks posed to their environment, is wide of the mark. It is true that the first attempt at fracking in the UK, by Cuadrilla near Blackpool in 2011, generated minor earth tremors and major protests.
But when the Mail visited a few years ago, some residents said they felt the debate had been hijacked by out-of-town activists bussed in to whip up locals’ fears.
Dame Vivienne Westwood and Hollywood star Dame Emma Thompson, for example, were among the big names to have made the 240-mile journey north from London to campaign against the practice.
One Blackpool hotelier, who asked not to be identified, said they received ‘nasty emails’ telling them they were ‘the Devil’ when they gave evidence in favour of Cuadrilla at a planning hearing. Others said they were spat at and had to be rescued by the police.
So when Laura Jones, a 41-year-old Gainsborough businesswoman, says she’d ‘probably be shot’ if she is ‘really honest’ about her views on fracking, she is only half joking.
She says energy bills at The Florist, which she runs at Marshall’s Yard – a former ironworks turned outdoor shopping centre – have risen from £130 to £350 a month in only a year.
She adds that she has been hit particularly hard because of the cost of running her cooler, which she uses to keep flowers she imports from the Netherlands.
She has been forced to raise prices as a result. ‘That’s very hard as a small business because you don’t want to lose your customer base,’ she says.
‘Of course, Tesco and M&S are not fussed about a few extra hundred quid a month.’
Jones appreciates the environmental concerns around fracking, but says ‘you have to be cut-throat, adding: ‘I’d be in favour of it if it helps local business.’
The vast majority of businesses in Lincolnshire are small, independent ventures, like hers.
In Gainsborough, most who spoke to the Mail were in favour of fracking the trough.
‘I say let’s go for it!’ says Azeem Mohsam, 45, who is bubbling with enthusiasm at his cupcake cafe in Marshall’s Yard.
Storr, the butcher, agrees, arguing that livelihoods should be the priority. ‘Unfortunately, money does sort of come over the environment,’ he says. ‘I know that’s maybe a single-minded way to look at it but if fracking is the way forward for producing energy, I think we have to go with it.’
Job hunter Malone says the ‘positives outweigh the negatives’ if it means more work for locals.
Meanwhile, Lincolnshire councillor Colin Davie, who oversees the county’s economic development plans, highlights the plight of dozens of elderly residents in his coastal village of Ingoldmells, just north of Skegness, who he says are ‘freezing to death’ because they can’t afford to heat their homes.
A study published by the National Institute of Health in the US in 2023 found that a 42 per cent drop in the natural gas price in the late 2000s, mostly driven by the shale gas boom, averted 12,500 deaths per year in the country. Canute may have failed to conquer Mother Nature, but his other earthly achievements still earned him the addendum ‘the Great’ and – a thousand years on – an even greater honour: a pub in his name in the town centre.
It is hard to imagine Gainsborough showing the same deference to Miliband anytime soon.
Of course, not everyone here agrees. Antiques dealer Paul Crow, 66, is dead against the fracking site, saying Britain should concentrate on renewables instead.
Gas is talked of as an essential ‘bridging fuel’, needed to wean Britain off dirty oil while it expands renewables. But burning it, while cleaner than oil, still produces carbon dioxide and fracking sites leak methane.
Lesley Rollings, deputy leader of the local West Lindsey district council, is sceptical of claims that the development would create jobs for locals, suggesting that large energy companies would instead bring in outside workers (the fracking plan is being pushed by Texan firm Heyco).
She also doubts whether it really would lead to falling energy bills and declares the whole project ‘opportunistic’.
The truth is there is a whole bunch of unknowns. The claims put forward by Heyco are yet to be subject to proper scrutiny, while it should also be said that the geology of the UK is generally not as hospitable to fracking as it is in the US, making it riskier.
Many locals here say they are only for it if it is proved to be safe. Greenpeace UK points out that the fracking industry has previously proved itself incapable of adhering to environmental conditions attached to their projects.
But it is Miliband’s stubborn refusal even to countenance the possibility that rankles most.
‘We need to give local communities the power to make their own decisions,’ says Sir Edward Leigh, the Tory MP for Gainsborough.
‘A blanket ban on fracking is a bad idea. Fracking gets a bad rap but we need proper research on what the risks and advantages are. If it’s safe, then why not?’
It seems the tide may be beginning to turn, just not in the direction Miliband wants.
On Wednesday, BP axed £4billion of renewables spending while boosting investment in oil and gas by 20 per cent a year to £8billion.
Chief executive Murray Auchincloss said the oil giant had been on a ‘misplaced’ rush to Net Zero.
It came after Donald Trump’s promise to ‘drill, baby, drill’ encouraged the oil and gas industry to focus more on fossil fuels.
And if Rachel Reeves’ thirst for growth continues to trump Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry – as it has in the case of Heathrow’s third runway – he may find he runs out of allies this side of the Atlantic, too.