Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 1:33 pm on 9 October 2019.
Minister, it's very welcome to hear that the Welsh Government continues its robust opposition to fracking, particularly the implications that that has for our environment as much as anything else. But, on fracking, there's also deep borehole testing, and some of this work is being done on NRW land as well. Can you, therefore, have discussions with your colleague in the Cabinet who is in charge of planning to ensure that deep borehole applications are also considered as an outlier to fracking, and, as such, whether councils should actually be considering that or not? And will you give guidance to councils in relation to that, because we could end up with a lot of communities being very anxious, very nervous as a consequence of an application, on which we will know nothing will happen because of the robust statement that you've just made?