Fracking & Reform

Dozens of Reform UK target seats at risk of being fracked, analysis shows

Home » Fracking & Reform

Published: September 12, 2025
This Article was written by: Katie Hill - My Green Pod
energy, fracking, politics

0 Shares

A total of 34 target constituencies for Reform UK will be among those first in line to be fracked should the party deliver on its promise to lift the moratorium on fracking, a new analysis from Greenpeace’s investigative journalism unit, Unearthed, has found.

The analysis comes after the right-wing party’s deputy leader Richard Tice announced last week that Reform would immediately lift the ban on fracking, which was put in place in 2019, after exploration at a site in Preston, Lancashire triggered a series of minor earthquakes.

But Unearthed’s analysis of the areas most likely to see licence applications identified 127 constituencies across England and Wales where drilling licences were issued over shale gas reserves in the years before the current fracking ban was imposed.

More than a quarter (34) of those identified are parliamentary seats where Reform came first or second in the last election.

The majority of these are Labour-held seats in the north west, Yorkshire or the East Midlands.

They include the constituencies of two of Reform’s four sitting MPs: Lee Anderson, MP for the Nottinghamshire constituency of Ashfield, and Sarah Pochin, who narrowly won the seat of Runcorn and Helsby from Labour in a by-election earlier this year.

‘Farage is threatening more than a political earthquake. The real-life tremors that Reform’s plans for fracking risk creating could send seismic waves through the ground and homes of the very people he needs to woo in order to get into power.

‘Fracking failed in the UK because this destructive industry is deeply unpopular and was vehemently rejected by the British public.

‘That so many fracking licences are in the seats Farage needs to win, where many potential Reform voters – and even Reform-led councils – would oppose the plans, shows that this idea is just a divisive distraction.

‘Voters lured by Reform’s promise of change will realise that all they really offer is higher bills for us and bigger profits for their fossil fuel funders.’

AMI MCCARTHY
Greenpeace UK’s head of politics

Attitudes to fracking

Fracking is deeply unpopular with the UK public. Over the past six years, YouGov polling has consistently shown around 50% opposition to a British shale gas industry, against around 25% support.

Reform’s base tends to be pro-fracking, in sharp contrast to the population at large. However, new YouGov polling for Persuasion UK shows that the policy is divisive within the coalition of voters the party will be seeking to build.

The polling shows that Reform-curious Labour voters are more likely to support than to oppose a UK-wide fracking ban, and are opposed to having new fracking sites in their area by a clear margin.

The polling also shows that people who first voted Reform after the 2024 election are more likely to oppose than to support fracking in their local area.

This division is also reflected in local government. Earlier this summer, the Reform-led Scarborough Town Council came out in opposition to an application for a ‘fracking-style’ appraisal well on nearby land.

The council stated that it stood in ‘full support’ of local residents in ‘opposing a fracking-style hydrocarbon development that threatens the area’s landscape, geology, biodiversity, tranquillity, and road safety’.

Lancashire’s Reform-led county council announced last week that its Fylde Coast is ‘not conducive to fracking, and there are no plans for it to take place here’.

Simon Evans, deputy leader of the council, suggested that more activity was expected in the east, rather than the north west of England.

Tice has since insisted that fracking remains possible in Lancashire, and downplayed the seriousness of tremors caused by shale gas exploration.