Noisy protest drowns out the truth about fracking Apart from the fact that Cuadrilla, at the point the accounts were signed off by its auditors last month, held licences for 10 sites across the UK, where it hopes to be able to hydraulically fracture underground rocks to release oil and gas. Cuadrilla, for those still in the dark, is the company at the forefront of the UK's fracking revolution. Never now far from the headlines, this weekend its licence near the village of Balcombe, West Sussex, remained centre stage as hundreds of demonstrators gathered near its site to protest against its activities. The protesters - including unlikely poster girl Dame Vivienne Westwood, the fashion designer - have said they are preparing to take part in six days of "direct action." As a result, Cuadrilla, on police advice, has scaled back its operations. After a flurry of television interviews late last week, Egan, the new face of fracking, has disappeared from view. The halt to proceedings is just a temporary one, and in the scheme of Cuadrilla's long-term plans, is a mere blip. But the Balcombe protesters are not alone. Whether it be the Church of England or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the clamour of noise against the nascent fracking industry grows louder by the day. Although those groups which oppose fracking have clear concerns, and a debate should be had, it should not be one-sided. If environmentalists are worried about the breeding and grazing grounds of rare geese, let companies like Cuadrilla at least put forward evidence to show what has happened to ecologically important sites in other countries where fracking has taken place. If church members think fracking will ruin God's creation, at least listen to the geological evidence put across by the industry. To date, the debate has been rather too much like that around the other recent bête noire of the Church of England, the payday lending industry, with critics piling in to do fracking down, with little oxygen given to those in the know. Egan was quite right when he said last week that "people are having to debate without the facts . . . the reality is often very different from the fear." He admitted that his own company had not yet explained what it wants to do clearly enough - the current work at Balcombe involves mere test drilling - and there is certainly work to do when it comes to the industry's public relations specialists getting their message across. But underlying the debate is the real reason why companies like Cuadrilla - and others in the sector including IGas Energy - are so important. Fracking could provide a way to help secure the UK's energy future in the medium term. A British Geological Survey report looking at northern England, released at the end of June, said that just that one part of the UK could provide enough shale gas to meet the UK's energy needs for more than 40 years. The survey found that there could be 1,300 trillion cubic feet of gas trapped in the rocks under Lancashire, Yorkshire and surrounding counties - and although there is no way of knowing how much of that could be extracted via fracking, even if it was only 10pc, it could meet Britain's gas demands for more than four decades. To date, the debate on fracking has been far too one-sided. Yes, there are concerns, and these should be addressed. But, save from comments such as those from Lord Browne which we report today, not enough of the potential benefit to the UK economy as a whole has been explained. Some of the blame for this should be laid at the door of the companies involved - they need to be more fleet-of-foot in rebutting some of the wild allegations and to stand firm in the face of protests by the usual environmental suspects. I realise this is not a popular opinion to hold, but fracking is one of the keys to the UK's energy future. If the noise from the uninformed is allowed to stop even testing from taking place, that will send the wrong message to investors and companies involved in the energy sector, and send them looking elsewhere for real returns. The spoils of RBS collapse It is always nice to see the return of an old friend, and who nicer than Sir George Mathewson, the one-time patriarch of the Royal Bank of Scotland? Sir George, as we report today, is chairman of Toscafund, the London hedge fund which is a major investor in one of the vehicles trying to buy the Scottish bank's 315-branch "Project Rainbow" business. The unit is up for sale at the behest of the European Commission, in return for the Government's £45bn bail-out of the bank following its collapse in 2008. Sir George left RBS in 2006, having been chief executive and chairman for 14 years in total, masterminding the merger with NatWest. Although not the chairman at the time of RBS's catastrophic takeover of ABN Amro, which triggered the need for the bail-out, he arguably sowed the seeds by promoting and backing Fred Goodwin, its chief executive, and remained a paid adviser until July 2009. The irony that a fund he now chairs is trying to benefit from the spoils of the collapse will not be lost on many, particularly our friends north of the border.