Offshore Wind Transmission Connections

Joy Morrissey Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Duncan Baker]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker; it is a privilege that I have not done something wrong in the Chamber.

Since December 2019, I have had many meetings with my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland, and I commend him for the passion with which he has served and tried to help those communities that have seen potential road maps of cable corridors coming through their small villages. He has been a champion for trying to stop that in those communities. I used to live in one of those communities—Cawston—and I know how much he has done to help it. One of the problems is that the current regulations prohibit the sharing of infrastructure due to competition rules, so each individual company must construct separate cable corridors.

[Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

I am not fortunate enough to have a beautiful coastline along my constituency, although Beaconsfield is beautiful indeed—the most beautiful, I would wager, but we can debate that later. Does my hon. Friend agree that those who are passionate about tackling the climate change emergency and are providing new and alternative forms of energy need infrastructure that can be shared with everyone, including small community energy suppliers, and that we need to look at how we can expand that infrastructure to not only wind farms but other alternative forms of energy?

[Duncan Baker]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I know that she has an equally beautiful constituency; perhaps we should do an exchange programme one day and view each other’s constituency. She makes an important point: wind energy is just one part of the jigsaw of how we decarbonise and create enough green energy. There will be other forms of energy that are part of the mixture that will help us to decarbonise by 2050. We are lucky in Norfolk and Suffolk to have an enormous amount of wind energy off our coast, but there are many areas around the country with leading initiatives that are helping in the fight to tackle climate change.

The point I want to highlight, and the reason why this debate is so important, is what these cable corridors are leading to. They are causing major environmental damage, as wildlife habitats and agricultural land are dug up multiple times. Nutrient-rich land is sometimes irreversibly damaged from the disturbance caused, and many farmers report poor crop growth along cable routes—much worse than before those cables were put into the ground—caused by the disturbance of the digging. Communities also suffer great socioeconomic damage from the disruption and upheaval caused. For businesses that are along cable routes, there is disturbance, including from heavy goods vehicles and traffic for many months—sometimes up to a year—while these trenches are being dug. It causes enormous problems for these small, often rural communities in my part of the world.