Wind Farms: Protected Peatland

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) on securing this important debate. Since this Labour Government came to power, they have been recklessly zealous in their commitment to net zero targets over all else, not least their willingness to trash our countryside for wind turbines, ground-mounted solar and more, when far less land-intensive energy solutions such as small modular reactors would deliver our energy needs in a much more sympathetic way to our landscape, food security and natural environment.

On the one hand, the Government promise to restore our natural environment, while on the other, they open England’s protected peatlands to industrial wind farm development such as Calderdale, which my hon. Friend mentioned in his speech. I wish him luck, and I support him, in his fight against that monstrosity as he sets out to protect his constituents and iconic Brontë country.

The consequence is that habitats storing more than 3 billion tonnes of carbon, formed over centuries and millennia, are now exposed to excavation, road building and the foundations of turbines. What do people get in return? They get not a ban, not a firm line, but guidance from the Government that says that deep peat should be “avoided”—a word that is not a prohibition, merely a suggestion. That will create irreparable damage to irreplaceable habitats, and it has been reduced to a footnote in a planning document.

In January 2026, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero published guidance permitting wind farm development on peatland. The national planning policy framework states that development on irreplaceable habitats, which includes a quarter of England’s peatland, should be refused, yet the Government have chosen just guidance over prohibition. It is shocking but unsurprising of this Labour Government—we find contradictions in their policymaking at every corner. Crucially, the new guidance on construction practices for wind farms on peatland has not even been published yet—the bulldozers may arrive before the policy framework lands.

That failure extends beyond one habitat. Peatlands supply more than a quarter of the UK’s drinking water and provide fertile agricultural land and habitats for rare wildlife. The Government’s secondary legislation, which came into effect in December 2025, removed the de facto ban on onshore wind, handing planning consent back to the corridors of Whitehall, rather than local communities. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) said, that bypasses the consent of local people and empowers the Secretary of State to impose infrastructure irrespective of their concerns. Given that Labour controls the levers of national Government, energy policy and planning guidance simultaneously, that should give us pause for thought: what are they trying to achieve?

The Government hold a statutory responsibility to protect irreplaceable habitats, which makes it even more important that they demonstrate visible leadership on this issue, rather than convenient ambiguity. Instead, Energy Ministers tell us that existing protections are sufficient, yet those existing protections have not prevented the guidance from being issued. The Government cannot have it both ways. Over recent years, costs imposed on rural communities by energy infrastructure decisions have grown significantly. With the expansion of the NSIP regime, increases in centrally directed planning consent and innovations in bypassing local democratic oversight, the least that those communities could expect is that their most precious landscapes would be protected.

In addition, when the science itself warns against development on peatland, the Government should be able to point to a clear policy to reflect that. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has been unambiguous, stating that “modelling…suggests” that

“emissions from the windfarm development on undamaged peatlands…will not”—

I repeat, “will not”—

“be offset by…the green energy generated.”

That is not a fringe position, but the conclusion of the body dedicated to this very question.

As ever, I would like to be charitable, but it is hardly surprising that the Government have been slow to draw a firm line when their approach to net zero treats all means as justified by the end.

[Anna Dixon]

Will the shadow Minister clarify his own party’s position? Does it remain committed to net zero, and does it acknowledge there will be a lot of nature damage if we do not make the transition swiftly to generating clean and renewable energy by 2030?

[Greg Smith]

The Conservative party has been very, very clear on that. We believe in decarbonisation, but we need to do it in a way that people can afford and that does not trash our country in the process, in the way that ground-mounted solar and these wind farms do. The points I am making in arguing that damaging untouched peatland ends up causing more environmental damage than the supposed benefits of the wind farms that those who argue for them want to put there should make every Member of the House pause. They should think whether, in getting to decarbonisation, we are not creating more problems than we are solving by simply taking the first technology off the shelf or going for the convenient bit of land that might be available to build this on. It is a totally false economy to go down the rabbit warren of saying, “It looks green, so we must do it,” rather than doing a whole-system analysis, from the manufacture of parts to the destruction of habitat, land and place across our country. That may actually reveal that the results are not as green as they look on the metaphorical packaging.

The guidance does little to help the communities living along these landscapes, the wildlife that depends on them, or indeed the climate if carbon storing habitats are destroyed in the name of carbon reduction. In contrast to that inaction, there is a straightforward solution: prohibit wind farm development on protected peatland across our country—full stop. Despite the Secretary of State holding responsibility for both energy and net zero, it is preposterous that no such ban has been enacted. It is either that the Government do not wish to constrain their ambitions or are displaying sheer negligence towards the natural environment they claim to champion.

The reality is that this is not an abstract problem. These are living landscapes that once destroyed cannot be recovered on any human timescale. We need the Government to bring forward a clear prohibition—not guidance, balance or nuance deployed as a smokescreen, but a complete ban. Without the will to protect these habitats absolutely, the peatlands will be lost, and with them 3 billion tonnes of stored carbon, a quarter of our drinking water supply and the quiet, irreplaceable richness of the United Kingdom’s upland landscape.