Planning and Solar Farms

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Wednesday 19th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Nokes. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) for securing this important debate.

It is really good that the issue of solar farms and planning has been raised. It is obvious to us all that we have to shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy; nobody would demur from that. As well as the environmental benefit of saving the planet, renewable energy also has the advantage of cutting people’s bills, and again nobody would argue against that.

The hon. Lady said that it can sometimes feel like all the solar panels in the country are in her Lincolnshire constituency, but I assure her that that is not correct: we have stacks of them in my part of Devon. The small parish of Hawkchurch, a village in my constituency that borders Dorset and Somerset, is already home to more than 100 acres of fsolar arms.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

Although I recognise that the hon. Gentleman is advocating passionately for his constituency, I must point out that more than 50% of land nationally with proposed solar plants is in Lincolnshire, Leicester and Rutland, so we are disproportionately at threat.

[Richard Foord]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that point. We have heard that nationally there are 600,000 acres of roof space on which solar panels can be put. That is an excellent point to make. Certainly, for some of my constituents, it can feel like the solar panels are concentrated in some small areas.

When approval is sought for renewable energy projects—not just solar but onshore wind—they can hit a roadblock and get stuck in limbo. That is why this process can drag on and become a real scourge on our communities, as the developers and the local people battle it out.

Anyone buying a new Ordnance Survey map today will see something they would not have found 20 years ago: many new solar farms. I am not a big fan of the term “solar farm”, because to me a farm is for producing food, not electricity. Solar and wind are two of the quickest and cheapest forms of sustainable energy. If we are to reach net zero, we need a joined-up plan for connecting our existing power grid to renewable sources of energy. Solar accounts for just 5% of total electricity output, compared with about 27% for wind.

Between them, the solar schemes awaiting construction would generate 15,000 MW per day, which is enough to power 1.9 million homes. An enormous number of solar schemes are in the planning stage but have not yet been approved, and some of them could affect people in my part of the world. One enormous solar farm between Talaton and Whimple, near my constituency, would power 12,000 homes.

As people increasingly transition from heating their homes with oil to heating them with electricity, we need to think about not only power generation but insulation. In 2012, the Government were insulating 2.3 million homes per year, whereas now they insulate fewer than 100,000 homes per year. Let us think about not only how we can generate more but how we can conserve electricity.

Two of the main challenges in respect of advancing plans for solar are, first, how we plug into the national grid and, secondly, how we address the concerns of local communities. I hear the point about how prized agricultural land can appear to be lost under solar panels. The effect on local communities relates not only to the site—people sometimes get a little bound up with what solar panels look like—but to the sustained level of heavy goods vehicle traffic, because a lot of traffic goes back and forth to maintain the panels. We have to properly address local communities’ concerns to ensure that we do not hold up all solar panels and all solar renewable energy in this country.

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[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) for securing this important debate. It is no coincidence, as I said earlier, that many of us speaking in this Chamber today represent Rutland, Leicestershire or Lincolnshire, which have historically been known as the breadbasket of England. They have fed our nation for centuries, yet we are seeing a concentration of solar developments in those areas, with more than 50% of all land nationally proposed for solar plants being in Lincolnshire and bordering counties. Colleagues might wish to adopt the term “solar plants”, because that is what they are. I worry that it does not bode well for our national food security when the heartlands of our agriculture are being assaulted.

At my last count, there were 77 solar plants currently proposed in Lincolnshire and bordering counties, totalling over 38,000 acres of land in just our corner of this great country. In Rutland and Melton alone, we have solar plants proposed or in place in Exton, Ryhall, Essendine, Ragdale, Barkestone, Plungar, Ketton, Ranksborough, Pilton, Muston, Uppingham and Belmesthorpe, let alone in nearby Stamford villages such as Carlby, Braceborough and Casewick. It is unacceptable that we are seeing this assault on our local planning infrastructure.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is very clear in its guidance that grade 3a and above best and most versatile farmland should not be used for energy projects. Solar Energy UK says that solar plants

“generally utilise previously developed land, such as brownfield sites, and land of lower agricultural quality”,

but that is simply not true. Here are a few examples by geographical location. In Bassetlaw, 100% of all solar plants are on BMV land. In Scruton, it is 97%; in Drax, 94%; in Shropshire, 97%; in Camblesforth, 94%; and in Old Malton, 60%. That cannot be right. In my constituency of Rutland and Melton, there is the proposal for the 2,000-acre Mallard Pass solar plant, which is made up of just 6% grade 1 land, 47% grade 2a land and 47% grade 3b land. If it goes ahead, we will lose 2,000 acres of productive farmland. If we are serious about food security, we cannot allow that to happen, because if it does, by 2050 only 9.2% of land classified as BMV will still be under cultivation for food purposes.

Everyone needs to stand by the protection of our farmland. To make that a reality, I am calling on DEFRA to make its guidance against energy projects on BMV land legally binding. I will table a clause to the Energy Bill to protect BMV land from excessive solar development, and I hope that all Members here today will sign it, to make clear that we need to put this into law.

I want to touch briefly—in contrast with the comments made by many colleagues—on solar developers essentially making a mockery of our planning process by putting in proposals for plants producing 49.9 MW to avoid the scrutiny of being over 50 MW as a nationally significant infrastructure project. From my research, I have discovered that one developer, Econergy, which has two applications for solar plants in the UK—one is in Rutland—is claiming to the planning authorities that those plants will produce just 49.9 MW. However, in internal presentations that are apparently only for shareholders but have been put on the company’s website, those developments are listed as generating 80 MW and 53 MW. Essentially, these applications are going into the local planning system under the pretext that the plants will produce 49.9 MW, when they are not and have no intention of doing so. This suggests foul play.

If solar developers are playing the system to avoid scrutiny, they must be punished by the Planning Inspectorate, just as any person would be if they broke planning laws. I have given those documents to the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to ask for an urgent investigation, because due process must be followed.

I also call on the Government to act on forced Uyghur labour in solar supply chains. The US and the EU have both taken concrete actions to protect their markets from goods that are produced by Uyghur slaves, yet we have done nothing. Consequently, we are now a dumping ground for goods made with Uyghur slave labour, making a mockery of our modern slavery laws and the vote in this House to declare the persecution of the Uyghurs a genocide. From June to November 2022, over 1,000 shipments of solar panels from China were seized by the United States due to their links with Uyghur forced labour. Not one shipment has been seized in the UK.

Canadian Solar, the developer behind the proposed Mallard Pass solar plant in Rutland, is one of the worst offenders. Not only have its suppliers been sanctioned by the US Government, but it has had shipments seized, and it is now being done for tariff dodging because it put its products through Thailand, hoping that the US authorities would not notice that they were originally made in China. Canadian Solar was named in the Sheffield Hallam University report as guilty of being complicit in genocide, and even its shareholders tried to deselect its board over links to forced labour. It then called my office and said, “What would Alicia like, to drop her opposition to our solar plant? We’d love to know what she would like in return for this.” No, I will not be bought off and I hope that no one on my Lib Dem-led council is meeting Canadian Solar and having similar conversations.

Why is Canadian Solar allowed to apply to build nationally significant infrastructure in our country, and why are the Government not taking action? Something is not right here, and if the Government will not act, I ask hon. Members to back me and the other clause I will table to the Energy Bill to insulate our market from panels tainted by Uyghur blood and other forms of forced labour.

Solar will be an important part of our push for net zero. That is what we in Rutland want, but we will not have it at any price, and communities in Rutland and the Stamford villages will not accept blood-tainted products. To ensure that solar’s contribution is truly a positive one, I call on the Government to make guidance against building energy projects on BMV land legally binding. I ask them to urgently investigate solar developments misrepresenting their applications as generating only 49.9MW and to punish any offenders, and to follow the US and EU in finally blocking solar imports made with Uyghur forced labour as part of genocide, because to fail to act would be immoral.

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[James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I have been a passionate environmentalist for most of my adult life and most of my time here in Parliament. I went to the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro as a special adviser in 1992, and since then have been involved in almost every aspect of environmental discussion in this place.

For that reason, I am passionate about the necessity to achieve net zero by 2050. We must do it; there is no question about it. I spent a lot of time travelling in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, and I have seen the effects of global warming. There is no question about it: we must do this thing, and renewable energy is of course the way we must do it. We should not come away from our commitment to the use of renewable energy to achieve net zero. I am also absolutely convinced that solar supplies a very large part of that. It is by far the cheapest, most effective and most efficient way of producing renewable energy, so I am a passionate supporter of solar energy, too. That is how I should perhaps preface my remarks.

However, I have a number of concerns, and the first is about solar energy itself. The planning permissions that have been granted are for 40 years. The technology is developing at breakneck speed, and I do not believe that the solar farms across Wiltshire—incidentally, Wiltshire is the second largest solar county in Britain—will still be there in 40 years’ time. They will be removed, and those sites will then be brownfield sites and will be replaced by something equally obnoxious. It is extremely unlikely that they will go back to being productive farmland.

That is perhaps compounded by the fact that much of this activity involves, as some of my hon. Friends have said, complex financial shenanigans. Wall Street and Chinese financial companies are investing in this business, because they know it is enormously profitable. They could not care less about renewables. They could not care less about agriculture. They could not care less about Britain. They do care about making a substantial buck out of it. We have to look into the way in which these things are funded; we have to look into these companies. Who pays for these things and who is getting the profits from that? It is an important point.

[Alicia Kearns]

On exactly that point, Canadian Solar, the company that I mentioned earlier—I am sure that the Foreign Office Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra), will report back, now that he is here—needs to be sanctioned urgently. It is not Canadian. In fact, it is a Chinese company—Chinese run and based in China—pretending to be Canadian. I wonder why it would not choose a Chinese name for the business. Can my hon. Friend help me?

[James Gray]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend; she is of course quite right.

We are concerned about the technology; it will not last. We are concerned about the 40-year planning permission that has been granted. We are concerned about who stands behind this. I am also very concerned, in a technical sense, about battery storage units. These solar farms are no use at all, because the use of energy fluctuates during the day and therefore there have to be very substantial—and hideously ugly—battery support units to make them work. These things are ugly, huge and dangerous—many of them burst into flames spontaneously. A very large question exists with regard to their technology. We must be very careful indeed about the way in which we use this stuff, for that reason alone.

Secondly, my hon. Friends have made a very important point about food security. Post Ukraine, we are deeply worried about who will feed us in Britain and who will feed the world. It strikes me as morally quite wrong to be covering good agricultural land—3b is good agricultural land—with vanity mirrors being paid for by overseas investors. That seems to me to be morally unacceptable; morally, it simply cannot be sustained.

The food production versus energy security argument is a potent one, and of course the very simple answer to the energy security question comes, as my hon. Friends have said, from putting solar farms or solar panels off agricultural land. I am proud that in my constituency I have RAF Lyneham, which has the largest solar farm in Europe. It is huge—absolutely enormous—but cannot be seen by anybody. It is on former military land. The same applies to Wroughton, just outside my constituency, where, again, one of the largest solar farms in Europe is on entirely unproductive land. That is absolutely fine, but why are we having a spate of applications right across North Wiltshire for 200-acre or 300-acre sites on grade 3b land that has been used for years for the production of wheat and of grass? Indeed, in the west country, those crops are very important with regard to dairy. It has been used for donkey’s years to do that, but all of a sudden, because it is 3b and these companies are going round proving it is 3b, somehow there is a presumption in favour of them getting the application.

That brings me to my final point.

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[Matthew Pennycook]

The right hon. Gentleman tempts me to stray outside my departmental responsibilities, which I will not do. I am afraid that we are in complete agreement with his Government, who say that there needs to be far more solar deployment on category 3 land. He may want to take it up with the Minister outside the debate.

We believe that the system needs a renewed focus on integrated spatial and infrastructure planning to ensure we are developing and using land strategically, and ensuring that large sites of more than 50 MW are appropriately distributed across the country. I listened with great interest to the comments of the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) about a land use framework. We certainly support that direction.

We believe the planning system needs proactive and strategic energy deployment to be integrated fully into local and neighbourhood plan development, and renewable development should feature prominently in the development plan’s soundness test. We believe the system needs to speed up the process for securing planning consent for renewable generation of all kinds for projects over and under 50 MW capacity.

That is not to say that we do not understand and appreciate the concerns that have been expressed in the debate. As I have made clear, there is no question but that we need a more strategic and planned approach to ground-mounted solar deployment across the country. We need to do more to drive up rates of rooftop solar installation and prioritise solar deployment on previously developed or lower-value land. We need to take steps to further maximise the efficiency of sites used for renewable deployment, and co-locate infrastructure wherever possible to mitigate its impact on communities. We need environmental protections to remain in place, and we need communities to continue to have a say about where large-scale projects are best located.

Ensuring we have a sensible approach to large-scale ground-mounted solar deployment does not mean that there is an option to refuse it wholesale.

[Alicia Kearns]

I am slightly surprised that the hon. Gentleman has not mentioned human rights. He has dashed my hopes of the Labour party’s support for my new clause to the Energy Bill—although I will come back to him for a flip on that in a few weeks’ time—but what about the amendment that recognises that we should not be importing Uyghur-produced slave labour solar panels?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. I hope she will forgive me if I do not outline a Front-Bench position on a particular amendment that is outside my departmental responsibility—

[Alicia Kearns]

No, please do! You speak on behalf of your party.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will certainly feed the point back to my colleagues. [Interruption.] I am answering the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton. In general terms, we are very concerned about and share the concerns about the supply chains for solar and the use of slave labour. I have listened to the hon. Lady speak very eloquently on the subject many times, and I think we generally agree with the approach, but I cannot speak to the particular amendment she mentioned.

As I said, having a sensible approach to solar deployment does not mean that it can be an option to refuse it wholesale. It is deeply problematic that rates of solar farm planning permission refusal have risen significantly over recent years. We are committed to ensuring that communities have a say on where large-scale solar deployment should take place in their areas and want to do more in particular to boost community participation and engagement upstream at the plan-making stage, as well as ensure that communities directly benefit from local renewable installation. However, we feel strongly that the Government must address delays in the planning process and other regulatory processes that currently present a barrier to low-carbon infrastructure installation at scale.

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[Andrew Bowie]

I will endeavour to get an answer to the hon. Member’s question from the relevant Government Department, and I will ensure that it gets to him as speedily as possible after the conclusion of the debate.

[Alicia Kearns]

My hon. Friend the Minister has just made the point that 23 planning applications are currently in the NSIP process. As far as I understand it, not a single proposal has been turned down yet by the Government. Does that mean that, no matter what, NSIP projects will be given the green light to go ahead, even if the Planning Inspectorate blacks out MPs’ responses and all sorts of other things? Are the projects genuinely being looked at on a case-by-case basis, or will we just green-light any NSIP project to get more green energy?

[Andrew Bowie]

Absolutely not. There is no automatic green-light system, and I am assured that every proposal is looked at on a case-by-case basis and on its merits, taking into account the opinions and concerns of the local communities it will affect.

The NPPF makes it clear that local planning authorities should have a positive strategy for producing energy from renewable and low-carbon sources, such as solar farms. It sets out that where a significant development of agricultural land is shown to be necessary, areas of poorer quality should be used in preference to those of higher quality. If it is proposed to use any land that falls under Natural England’s BMV classification—best and most versatile agricultural land—that needs to be justified during consideration of the planning application. As defined in the NPPF, “best and most versatile agricultural land” constitutes land in grades 1, 2 and 3a of the agricultural land classification planning decisions, and decisions should continue to be made based on that definition. However, I have heard the concerns raised by hon. Members, and I will ensure that DLUHC Ministers are made aware of them.