Commitment failure

Oh what a brave new dawn it was! Cuadrilla decided that even though legal challenges were still outstanding they would fire the starting pistol on the Shale Gas Revolution and start developing their pad at Preston New Road.

“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive” as Wordsworth wrote, and in that optimistic mood Cuadrilla made a very public promise. They would “put Lancashire first in terms of creating jobs, investment, new skills and community initiatives as a result of shale gas exploration and, if exploration is successful, shale gas production in Lancashire.”

In order to demonstrate this they promised to publish a tracker quarterly in 2017 which would show how they were holding to their promise.

To be honest as soon as it became apparent that their major contract for site construction had gone to a company based in Greater Manchester (and not Lancashire as promised) this whole idea looked a bit risible, but we thought that they would at least try to get a version of the tracker released in the first quarter of the year.

But no – as at April 11th (Well into Quarter 2 of the year) their web site is still serving up a tracker which they refer to above as “the 2016 tracker”. No tracker was published in Q1 of 2017. Imagine our surprise!

So yet another PR fail at the first hurdle from Cuadrilla – they really don’t seem to care much what locals think of them after all, but we thought we’d give them a hand by publishing our own version here.