Safe Amid the Shake-Ups

England's main public health watchdog has bought itself a bit of time before the inevitable sell-off, by publishing a more or less favourable report on shale-fracking. The report has met with the approval of Cuadrilla, whose entrepreneurial activities caused a couple of earthquakes in Lancashire, but which did not see fit to mention the fact either to the regulator or to its chums in the Government. Cuadrilla claims that it had no legal obligation to report a few northerners being shaken up; if true, this presumably accounts for the claim by the energy minister, Michael Fallon, that "the UK has the most robust regulatory regime in the world for shale gas", just as it has the most robust regulatory regime for tax-dodging, executive rake-offs, corporate lobbying and so forth. Anyway, the report by Public Health England says that shale-fracking is fine as long as operations are "well-regulated and well-run"; so with the famously rigorous employers of Serco, G4S and Atos Healthcare in charge, what could possibly go wrong?