PRIME Minister David Cameron has backtracked on comments he made about community cash benefits of fracking during his visit to East Lancashire.

Last week Mr Cameron told factory workers at Crown Paints in Darwen it would be a ‘big mistake’ to miss out on the benefits offered by fracking – the process of extracting gas from shale rock drilling.

He said local communities would receive ‘immediately £1million’ from the opening of new wells, plus more if they were successful.

He said: “What we are looking at is trying to have a very simple system where every time a well is dug, immediately £1million goes to the local community.”

Downing Street has since stated that the Prime Minister meant to say communities would receive £100,000 and not £1million.

Local co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth, Brian Jackson, said Mr Cameron ‘has been talking rubbish since he got into power’.

He added: “Communities won’t even get £100,000 because the cost of clearing up the mess, including the water pollution, will be much greater than that. Any profit will go to the people running it.

“Cameron promises the earth but takes it instead.”

The Prime Minister’s gaffe comes just days after former government adviser Lord Howell, Chancellor George Osborne’s father-in-law, suggested fracking should be confined to the ‘desolate’ North East.

He later said he meant the ‘unloved’ North West.

Mr Jackson said: “The way they’re talking about Lancashire and Cheshire, you’d think it was the Nevada Desert in that there’s nobody here and he can take whatever he wants.

“But I don’t think any battle is ever lost, not until the frackers go away. “