Getting fracking up and running in England has been slower than expected, an official report has found. In 2016, the government forecast up to 20 wells would be fracked by mid-2020, but only three have been so far.

"Low public acceptance" of the controversial oil and gas extraction technique is partly to blame, the National Audit Office (NAO) found.

The UK has spent at least £32.7m supporting fracking since 2011, the government spending watchdog found.

The report found fracking had placed financial pressures on local bodies, including local authorities and police forces, which had been brought in to manage protests and maintain security.

Lancashire Constabulary reported that between 25 and 100 officers were directly involved in the policing of fracking sites every day between January 2017 and June 2019, at a cost of £11.8m.

Overall, Lancashire Constabulary, North Yorkshire Police and Nottinghamshire Police spent over £13m in two-and-a-half years providing security at shale gas sites, the report found.

There has been growing public disquiet about fracking. In 2013, 21% of government survey respondents were against shale oil and gas extraction. This rose to 40% of respondents in 2019, the NAO said.

Local authorities told the NAO the scale of opposition to fracking planning permission was "unprecedented".

"Lancashire County Council reported receiving about 36,000 representations from the public in relation to two fracking applications," it said.

People are concerned about risks to the environment and public health, earthquakes, and the adequacy of safety rules, the NAO said.

The National Audit Office officially has no opinion on whether fracking should continue on these shores, but its findings resemble a collection of nails available to be driven into the coffin of a once trumpeted shale gas revolution.

In 2013, there were heady promises that gas extracted from fracturing shale rock with water under high pressure could revolutionise the UK energy industry.

A technology that had changed the US energy industry and geopolitics with it could provide a bonanza of benefits to the UK.

As the gas from the North Sea dwindled, fracking would step in to make the UK less reliant on foreign imports that make up 60% of our gas supply.

This home grown resource would see prices fall and security of supply rise. It would provide tens of billions of new investment and tens of thousand of jobs in areas that desperately needed it and all this could be done safely and environmentally responsibly.

The NAO report is a hammer blow to those aspirations.

It found:

• no evidence that prices would be lowered
• uncertainty as to whether it could viably produce gas in meaningful quantities
• no plan for clean-up if a fracking firm were to go bust
• serial breaches of agreed limits on earth tremors
• strains on local authorities in fracking areas

Cuadrilla chief executive Francis Egan recognises that the industry's future is out of his hands.

"We were asked to find out if there is gas there, is it good quality, is it produceable. The answer to that is yes, yes and yes. It is up to the government to decide how it wants to exploit that. If people don't want it, they don't want it."

There are other reports due out imminently. The Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) is conducting analysis into the system of measuring the frequency and severity of the earth tremors that have halted fracking since the big tremor in July.

The government is awaiting the results of that report but, whatever it says, it seems unlikely that it will give fracking a new lease of life.

The Labour Party has already pledged to ban fracking immediately and government sources tell me that its own announcement about the industry's future is coming soon.

With an election round the corner and the cries of Extinction Rebellion ringing in the ears of voters (particularly younger ones), putting an end to fracking might be a tempting policy for a party keen to prove it can be trusted on the environment.