Clean Power 2030 Action Plan: Rural Communities

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, as I see that I now have an extra minute, I might take it to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Nagaraju, to his place. I welcome him to this House, from one technology geek and computer enthusiast to another, and congratulate him on a wonderful maiden speech.

Last month, the Government published the Land Use Framework for England. Seldom has such a long-awaited report been found to be out of date on the day of its publication. With all the intellectual depth of a sixth-form geography project, it fails to recognise that Britain—indeed, any society—is no more than three meals away from anarchy. A Government who forget that deserve everything that is coming to them. This is a debate about clean energy and the rural economy, and I declare an interest as being involved in farming and fertilisers.

I was struck that the framework outsources much of the future land use policy in this nation not to civil servants in Defra—or, for that matter, to any other part of government—but to the Green Finance Institute and the World Wide Fund for Nature, which are namechecked. The Green Finance Institute is recorded by the Electoral Commission as being a substantial donor to the Secretary of State for DESNZ. In an astonishing twist, Companies House shows that the Green Finance Institute and the WWF share co-directors within that same web of institute companies. For the first time, we see that Labour’s donors have written, and will control, rural policy in this nation through the land use framework. The donors have ensured that rural policy has been bent and twisted by those with an axe to grind, tainted by ideology and class hatred, viewed through the lens of wishful thinking and ignorant of the reality of what it takes to feed us.

Today, I sound the alarm in this debate, because there is one table in the framework, driven by net-zero 2030 ideology, that should strike fear into anyone who is concerned for our food security, our rural economy and the resilience of our society. Labour’s lobbyists have managed to insert into the report that fully 1.7 million hectares of productive land will be entirely removed from agriculture, and then there will be additional controls on the hunting and shooting—activities that help our rural country pubs to survive the winter. The Library tells me that Defra estimates that the total area of farmed land in England is 8.9 million hectares, so 1.7 million hectares is just shy of 20% of all the land farmed in England. The report breezily asserts that there is enough land to go round to feed ourselves. That simply cannot be true.

Let us see what it means for the rural economy, with the sort of analysis that the framework should have done but did not. A farmer would hope that his farm would yield, for example, 10 tonnes per hectare of wheat. With increased food-price inflation barrelling down the tracks, that might generate gross sales of £2,000 a hectare, and the 1,000 hectare farm would generate £2 million in sales. Let us hold that number.

Against that income, he might pay a neighbour for seed and a local merchant for fertiliser. There will be some crop protection products. His farm machinery will be serviced by a local dealer. The sheds and grain storage will need repairs, and there are vermin contractors, builders, fitters, fencers, ditch diggers, plant hire suppliers and any number of ancillary businesses such as timber, builders’ merchants and so forth.

In total he will pay £1.8 million to local suppliers, including that boiler repair man who the farmer keeps going to in the summer so he is available for the villagers in the winter. All these people buy meals in the pub or support the local post office stores. That is the rural economy that Labour is destroying.

That is one farmer of 1,000 hectares, but the Government want to remove 1.7 million hectares from production—that is what the land use framework says. The net-zero ideology, by my reckoning, will cost us 15% of our national cereal production: the grains that bake our daily bread, brew our beer and create our cakes.

The Government tell us that in 2022, agriculture’s contribution to the UK economy was £13.9 billion. Based on my simple arithmetic, 1.7 million hectares removed on the altar of net zero is £3.5 billion taken from the rural economy every year. These are round numbers, but it is between 20% and 25% of agriculture’s total GDP. These zealots will not rest until our best land is given up for solar, which generates no rural income at all—so there will be no need whatever for the little doers. Solar enriches only the private equity backers and the sovereign wealth funds.

I thank my noble friend for allowing me to enumerate so clearly the economic effects of Labour’s war on the countryside and the economic damage that is to be visited on our rural communities. Their jobs and our shared social fabric are being destroyed by Labour’s paymasters, who deny the harsh reality of putting food in our belly, without which a nation can neither thrive nor survive.

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[The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Lord Whitehead) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all those who have contributed to this important debate and particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, for securing it in the first instance. She made a number of important points that go along, I think, with her particular view about the role of renewables but are nevertheless important points that need considering as far as this debate is concerned.

Before proceeding, I want to add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Nagaraju, who made his maiden speech this afternoon. I think he will have gathered already from the acclaim around the House for his maiden speech that he will undoubtedly be a tremendous asset to our House in the future.

In her initial contribution, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, listed a number of alternatives to Clean Power 2030. What was striking about the list of alternatives she put forward is that they are mostly things that the Government are doing already. They are not necessarily exactly in the context of the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, although there are many more things in that plan than many noble Lords and others seem to think—for example, there is a substantial role to play for hydrogen in the action plan and on a longer-term basis after 2030.

The noble Baroness mentioned clean power: floating solar, energy from waste and small nuclear. The Government are actively involved in undertaking all these things at the moment. But I emphasise that they are not alternatives to the race or the journey to clean power; they are part of that journey, along with other things, such as offshore and onshore wind, solar, and various other arrangements that we can see blossoming before us.

The action plan is a requirement to get to mostly, or almost wholly, renewable power by 2030, both for reasons of carbon emissions reduction—and the move towards net zero by 2050—and to make sure that the nation has energy independence as far as is possible and that we are not dependent on fossil fuels from around the world dictating how our energy economy works for the future.

Noble Lords have drawn attention to just how hard this work will be to achieve those particular goals, and they are absolutely right: it is very ambitious to ask the energy system to translate itself into a low-carbon system with the speed that we hope will be achieved. But we ought to be clear that the means being put in place to do this are not the bogey mentioned by a number of noble Lords. This is genuinely clean power. It will, certainly for rural communities, enhance their way of life, with cleaner air and much greater community involvement in the power that will be introduced, which the noble Earl, Lord Russell, mentioned. Altogether, this will make our society a much cleaner, greener and more liveable place overall.

That does indeed involve certain changes to how we deploy our power in the future. Noble Lords have mentioned that we may use 10% of productive farmland, for example, for solar and similar activities. Reports were mentioned, and the land use framework published by Defra in March 2026, for example, states that renewables are projected to take up approximately 155,000 hectares of England’s utilised agricultural area, which is about 2%, not 10%. As the noble Earl, Lord Russell, mentioned, that is far less than the amount of land taken up by golf courses in this country for the future. So it is not the huge take that some people suggest.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

The noble Lord is selectively quoting from the table, and he may indeed be right on solar, but the land use framework enumerates a whole load of other different types of use. In total, 1.7 million hectares—about a fifth of all the farmland in England—is to be taken from agriculture and applied to other uses. He cannot get away from that: those are the Government’s numbers.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

The noble Lord says I am selectively quoting. I am sorry to disagree with him, but I am not selectively quoting; I am quoting. That is what the land use framework says on the best estimates for the land that is being taken. In addition to that, he and other noble Lords will be aware that, in the guidance and arrangements for the development of solar, there is a clear understanding that the best and most versatile land will be excluded from those solar developments and that they should go primarily on brownfield land or less-important agricultural land, so that precisely that best and most versatile land for farming and food use is preserved for that activity. That is what is happening with the solar developments coming forward at the moment.

The other thing I want to mention on rural communities is that, when we are putting forward proposals for grid coverage of the country, as other noble Lords have mentioned—the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for example—that is not just about clean power 2030. Among other things, it is about getting the grid fit for energy for the future in general. Even if clean power 2030 were not in place, it would be necessary to undertake that huge programme of grid renewal and updating, partly because of the extreme neglect of grid uprating that took place during the Conservative Government who immediately preceded this Government. We are not just undertaking a grid for the future but catching up from the past.