Large-scale Solar Farms

Debate between Greg Smith and Karen Bradley

Thursday 18th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Yes, time and again we see a differential between what the developer’s surveyor and consultant come up with and what we believe the land to be. Much of my constituency sits on a blue clay base, so we expect a lot of it to be 3b. However, I come back to the point that I made: 3b land can be very good productive land producing the sorts of yields that I talked about. It is how that land has been farmed, often for generations, that dictates how good it is for production, not other things.

I made this point earlier: 60% of farms in the UK are tenant farms. However, beyond that, it is not just the farmers, the tenants or those employed on the farms who are hurt when that land is taken away from food production, but the packing plants, the equipment suppliers and the distributors. A huge part of our rural and national economy is hit when food production is diminished.

For the surrounding communities, the loss of farmland by no means starts or ends with solar panels. In the Claydons, for example, my constituents have suffered hugely from large-scale construction already, including a number of big housing estates, East West Rail and the ultimate destroyer, HS2. It is a daily struggle for them to get to work, school, the hospital, the GP or the shops without coming up against the obstacles of endless road closures, broken stretches of road that have become dangerous after the movement of thousands of HGVs, drivers travelling to and from nearby compounds, and severe light pollution during the winter months. That will be the same all over again with the construction of the huge solar farms. A solar farm of 2,100 acres is not built overnight. They are all put on concrete bases. There will be piling in places. The construction impact on local communities is considerable.

After all the disruption that my constituents have already taken—and are still taking—from those big national infrastructure projects, this once quiet corner of Buckinghamshire is now expected to take, in the case of Rosefield, a 2,100 acre development, which would dwarf the amount of land that High Speed 2 has taken in Buckinghamshire. Given the extent of the proposed site, it is not unreasonable to expect to see yet more of the same disruption that has plagued the Claydons for years. All of that comes without any commitment by the promoters to fix any of the damaged roads, which already have to be patched by the council, even though other people have broken them. It is simply not fair for my constituents and areas such as the Claydons to foot all that pain all over again.

It is not just the panels that consume vast amounts of countryside. The infrastructure needed to carry the electricity generated through to the grid swallows up yet more. It is no coincidence that adjacent to the proposed Rosefield site, there is a proposed battery storage facility, with the equivalent of 90 shipping containers of battery storage right next door. That is more food-producing land being sacrificed, and the facility itself poses a major fire risk in an area where the emergency services are already struggling, in the face of such disruptive amounts of construction work, to get to any emergencies that occur.

Let that be a warning to any community where solar is coming. It does not end with just the solar panels. Of course, there is no community benefit whatsoever from solar development, whether large or small. As has been said, there is no cheap electricity for local residents or businesses, and no support systems in place for those impacted by construction. There is no recourse for anybody affected.

I have spoken a lot about Rosefield, but I will briefly talk about some other large-scale solar developments in my constituency. In the south, we have seen an equally blatant tactic—admittedly, on a slightly smaller scale—of significant ground-based solar installations being installed or proposed just metres from each other. Let us take the proposed solar installation near the village of Kimblewick on the eastern side of the village of Ford, and Callie’s Solar Farm on the western side of Ford, which combined, would be the second largest land take in my constituency after Rosefield for ground-mounted panels. We have seen that tactic time and again; it puts community and local authority resources under strain, in turn diminishing their influence over the whole planning process. We have to find a way to ensure that the cumulative impact of solar farms is taken into account.

[Dame Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I apologise for not being here at the beginning of the debate; I was speaking in the Chamber. I will therefore not make a full speech, but I am grateful to be able to comment. My hon. Friend describes the exact situation that my constituents in Rownall face, with multiple applications being made for adjoining pieces of land, all of which are small scale and therefore to be decided by the local district council rather than the Secretary of State. They feel that that is an abusive way of putting in solar farms that will cumulatively be a very large development. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to pause the granting of all applications of this variety and urge district councils to have the appropriate training to identify and measure fully the cumulative impact of these developments?

[Greg Smith]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that intervention, and I agree. There should be a fundamental pause on any solar application that would take land used for food production. As the new national planning policy framework was being negotiated concurrent to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, I was pleased to be able to persuade the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to change the NPPF from the old language of “best and most versatile” to a straightforward definition of “land used for food production”. It was hidden in a footnote, but it was still there. If we can leverage that as the test that planning authorities now have through the NPPF, coupled with the sensible points that my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) made about going up in a helicopter to review all land being used and pausing any decisions, that would bring a lot of relief to communities—certainly mine in Buckinghamshire, hers in Staffordshire and many others as well.

Solar has its place, but that place is on rooftops and not in fields. Across my constituency are farms and industrial sites where the roofs of barns and warehouses are devoid of solar panels. My constituency adjoins both Bicester to the Oxfordshire side and Milton Keynes to the north-east. There are the rooftops of many thousands of distribution centres and warehouses, and these big sheds that are going up as logistics hubs everywhere, vibrantly adding to our economic development, but with no solar on the roof. If we just got the solar panels on those roofs instead, we would find more than enough space to ensure that we are delivering on the volume of solar-generated energy that we need.

CPRE research found that

“there is potential for…117 gigawatts”

of renewable energy

“to be generated from rooftops and other”

existing “developed spaces” in England alone, which is substantially more than the master target. Rooftop solar systems have to be the priority for Government, and I urge the Minister to find a way of ensuring that our solar strategy is a rooftop strategy, not an agricultural land strategy.

As she opened this debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham made a point about small modular reactors. She cited a statistic that I have used, which goes to the nub of this debate; it is the clearest argument I can make about a sensible land use strategy. The small modular reactors that we have seen companies such as Rolls-Royce develop need virtually no land to deliver significantly more power. She was kind to quote me, but I will repeat the statistic because I am quite fond of it: 2,000 acres of solar panels produce, on current usage, before everyone has two Teslas on the drive, 50,000 homes-worth of electricity. A small modular reactor is the size of two football pitches and can power 1 million homes. That surely has to be the more sensible use of land in this country to power people’s homes and businesses. Nuclear can deliver that in a clean and wonderful way while still protecting our national food security. Those numbers must speak volumes to anybody that cares about both the energy security and food security of our wonderful country.

My asks are clear. First, we simply must diversify our national energy security strategy to promote less land-intensive schemes, which come at the expense of our food security, and promote the development of more reliable, sustainable and less impactful schemes that we can actually deliver every day of the year. Secondly, we must put in practice the provision of the new language in the NPPF and encourage local authorities to use it. Thirdly, we must incentivise the use of existing rooftop space for stand-alone solar installations on sites that already have a grid connection and reform the grid to ensure that many more can as well. Let us get this right and stop the solar destruction, build our energy security on nuclear, protect our food security and save the great British countryside.

Health and Care Bill

Debate between Greg Smith and Karen Bradley

Report stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith]

My right hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head: if we are to tackle obesity as a country, we have to look at the most successful outcomes. Fundamentally, I believe those to be ones of education, ensuring that parents are empowered to be able to make the best decisions for their children and ensuring that people are empowered to come to the right choices for themselves. The point about these amendments is to ensure that we are not giving a green light to one side while harshly penalising another for hosting these adverts.

The nub of the point is that the broadcasters will, in effect, have to pre-clear any advertising that is put on to their platform and there will be very harsh penalties, leading right up to the point of revocation of their broadcast licence, if they fail to do this. By contrast, although the Bill puts significant restrictions on the online platforms, they are not put through that same test. They are not put through the same harsh restrictions and requirements that are broadcasters are. This is especially important when we consider recent evidence that has been put into the public domain. The Advertising Standards Authority recently drew considerable attention to the mass flouting of the rules by online influencers across many sectors. This House’s Select Committee on Work and Pensions made an important point about online regulation in a report in March this year on protecting pension savers. It said:

“Regulators appear powerless to hold online firms to account”—

for online advertisements—

“in the same way they would be able to for traditional media.”

We need to bear that in mind as we consider this Bill, because if current regulations do not work in that field, I fear that the regulations on online providers proposed in this Bill will not either.

I offer these amendments as a call to those on the Treasury Bench, including the Minister for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar)—an excellent Minister who will consider these points carefully—to rethink the practicalities of what we are saying to the broadcast and online sectors. If the Government are intent on pushing this forward, I ask them to find that parity that ensures that broadcasters are not unfairly penalised. Great British broadcasters—ITV, Channel 4, Channel Five, Sky—already produce some incredible educational programming about diet, cooking, wellbeing and lifestyle. It would be horrendous for us to cut off their lifeline of funding.

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I have put my name to my hon. Friend’s amendments because I agree with the points that he makes.

It is surely vital that those responsible broadcasters should not be penalised when they are doing the right thing—and yet there is effectively a wild west on the internet, where we are simply not able to manage the issue. I recognise that the Minister will be concerned that the online harms Bill will also deal with some of these matters, but we need to find a cross-Government way of dealing with this.

[Greg Smith]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right and speaks with great experience from her time as Secretary of State at DCMS. That is the fundamental point of the amendments; it is not a complex or difficult case, but purely one of fairness and treating the different platforms—the diverse media of 2021—the same, rather than pretending that the media from the old analogue age can somehow be treated differently from those of the digital age.

Let us not cut off the lifeline that funds so many good educational programmes. Let us think again about restrictions on advertisers, move forward in a way that can enable people to make the right and healthy choices about what they and their children eat without this level of restriction, and ensure that, when restriction is brought in, it is fair.