A SCATHING letter to an energy firm seeking to launch the first new fracking site in the country since earthquakes sparked a Government ban on the gas production method, has revealed its application was rejected by planners over dozens of issues.

North Yorkshire County Council told Third Energy that its application to hydraulically stimulate and test various geological formations at Kirby Misperton, in North Yorkshire, featured a catalogue of errors, lacked key details and failed to consider the effect on the 1.5m annual visitors to nearby FlamingoLand.

The nine-page letter, which has been obtained by Frack Free North Yorkshire and led to Third Energy withdrawing its application in May, said the firm had not detailed the volume of gas it expected to extract, the anticipated well reserve or the expected life of the well.

The council said while members of the gas industry body UKOOG had signed a charter agreeing to pay one per cent of production revenues to communities near well sites, UKOOG member Third Energy had only referred to voluntary and legal agreements in the application.

It added the application had not included details such as a noise monitoring scheme and had errors due to out of date maps.

The letter states documents' failures led to "a high likelihood of misinterpretation and incorrect assumptions".

Sue Gough, who lives in Little Barugh, a mile from the proposed well site, said: "We are simply astonished by this letter.

"Third Energy have been claiming for weeks that the application wasn't validated for purely administrative reasons, such as the misspelling of a road name and an incorrect email address."

Joanne Bartlett, who lives in Kirby Misperton, said: "If Third Energy can't even do the paperwork properly, it is hard to see how local residents can have any confidence in allowing the company to start fracking on their doorstep."

A Third Energy spokesman said it welcomed the publication of the letter as it was committed to full transparency.

He said: "The planning application together with the environmental statement and appendices ran to seven thick volumes of documentation and a small number of minor errors were found, and additional information required in several places.

"To deal with any issues and provide further information, Third Energy decided the simplest and cleanest way forward was to withdraw this application and submit a new application.

"We are confident all the information in our application, as well as all the assessments for the accompanying Environmental Statement, are robust, comprehensive and accurate."