Wind Farms: Protected Peatland

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Robbie Moore]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He makes an excellent point: the developers have failed to ascertain that the positives of the project outweigh its negative impacts, including the impact on the ability of the peatland to sequester and store carbon. That is before even considering all the negative impacts on highways, the impacts of the infrastructure that has to be developed and the impact on local communities. The renewable energy scheme will be incredibly detrimental; the peatland will hold more carbon. That is why I am firmly opposed to the development.

Another huge risk with the development of wind farms on sites of protected peatland such as Walshaw moor is the impact on both water quality and flooding. Peatland is 95% to 98% water—it has the same percentage of solid content as a jellyfish. Disturbing it through the construction of wind turbines on Walshaw moor will increase flood risk and damage water quality in Calder Valley towns and surrounding communities. Studies have shown that putting any kind of hard infrastructure on peatland has a direct negative impact on how peat interacts with itself; it prevents peat bogs from absorbing rainwater, which ultimately increases flood risk downstream and increases the likelihood of serious slipping incidents.

Peatland also plays a key role in regulating water quality. Around 72% of the UK’s reservoirs are fed from peat, and over 28 million people consume water from peaty catchments. Degradation and disturbance of peat is often accompanied by increases in dissolved and particulate organic carbon loads, which increases the treatment costs required to make water drinkable.

Another additional environmental risk associated with the Calderdale wind farm proposal is the risk to local wildlife. Walshaw moor is home to a number of protected bird species, including the lapwing, golden plover, merlin, short-eared owl and the curlew—today, in fact, is World Curlew Day. Those species use Walshaw moor as breeding grounds, and organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds have warned that disturbing such populations with the installation of wind turbines will significantly damage overall numbers of the birds.

I return to the specifics of the Calderdale wind farm’s impact on local heritage and culture. Rebecca Yorke and her team at the Brontë Society, who look after the Brontë parsonage in Haworth in my constituency, do incredible work. Understandably, our much-loved Brontë Society is firmly against the proposed wind farm development across our heritage landscape, which encompasses Top Withens, believed to be the inspiration for the setting of “Wuthering Heights”. That landscape, I might add, has a live application worked up right now for UNESCO world heritage status, along with listed status for Top Withens. All that has widespread community support.

Our literary landscape offering to the world, which inspired the Brontës’ imaginations in their renowned novels and poetry, is under threat. If this wind farm proposal goes ahead, that landscape will be blighted forever. We know that because, even after the decommissioning stage of the wind farm, none of the infrastructure is proposed to be removed, apart from the turbines themselves. The road infrastructure, all that cabling and those deep foundations that sit beneath the turbines are not proposed to be removed once the wind farm comes to the end of its life, blighting our heritage landscape and the peat forever.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that with nuclear power stations, for example, decommissioning costs are built into the cost-benefit analysis of any such projects, and yet that is not the case when wind farms are built in environmentally sensitive areas?

[Robbie Moore]

The right hon. Member makes an excellent point. He is absolutely right, because the decommissioning costs are not necessarily built into what the impact will be on our environment, our protected peat or our wildlife. I know that because the developers themselves say that once the site finishes its usage, parts of the development will not be removed—such as the piles, the infrastructure for the road, the foundations—but simply remain in situ.

Worse than that, however, should an additional wind farm come down the line, it will use the infrastructure that is already in place, but is likely to have to be expanded. A further real live concern is because when the application came before us, the initial proposal was for 65 wind turbines, although that has been reduced to 35 wind turbines now. That creates the real worry of it potentially being only phase 1 of a much bigger wind farm coming down the line. Therefore, once the precedent is set of an application being approved by the Government —it will be the Secretary of State who determines it—stage 2 will therefore come down the line. That deeply worries me.

I am grateful that, last week, I had the opportunity to speak with peat experts, Dr Andreas Heinemeyer, Professor Richard Lindsay, Dr Emma Hinchcliffe and Jessica Fìor-Berry, all of whom pointed to the complete lack of research and evidence about the impact of wind farm development on protected peatland. I therefore ask the Labour Government why the Minister is in favour of pushing through development on protected peatland such as Walshaw moor despite the hugely damaging impacts I have outlined in this speech.

The proposals for the Calderdale wind farm demonstrate a glaringly obvious hypocrisy that this Government show when it comes to protecting our protected, precious peatland. The Government were elected on a manifesto that committed to expanding nature-rich habitats such as peatlands. The Minister for Nature herself has repeatedly called our peatlands “this country’s Amazon rainforest”, so why do the Labour Government continue to support completely destroying them—when other options are available—given the scale of this development?

The development is being considered a nationally significant infrastructure project, so it will be the Secretary of State who determines the application. I ask the Minister, however, why have this Government permitted the developer to undertake its statutory consultation right now, during a period when the two local councils, Bradford council and Calderdale council, are in the middle of all-out local elections and cannot comment because of purdah? Will the Minister seek to extend the statutory consultation period, as I have requested of the Secretary of State? I ask all watching this debate who agree that this development will be catastrophic to participate in the consultation, which is open right now.

For the reasons I have set out, I am clear that this wind farm development must not be approved. My fellow Worth Valley Conservative councillors do not want it, my constituents do not want it, world-leading peat experts do not want it and I suspect the Nature Minister does not want it either, so why is the Minister enabling this proposal to continue under this Labour Government? What I am less clear on is the positions of my neighbouring Members of Parliament: the hon. Members for Halifax, for Shipley, for Calder Valley, for Pendle and Clitheroe and for Burnley. I urge them to join me in opposing this disastrous scheme.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. The hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore), who secured this debate, is probably surprised to have more response from Northern Ireland MPs than from those representing the constituencies surrounding his own, and he may wonder why that is the case. However, this problem is not specific to one area; it extends right across the United Kingdom. This problem will also only increase, exacerbating an issue that the Government have already accepted, that 80% of our peatlands have been either degraded or badly damaged, the impact of which has been outlined by other speakers.

The window of my house’s study looks on to the upper parts of the Antrim plateau, and it is almost like looking at an army of triffids marching across and destroying the peatlands. I have stood on the site of the most recent wind farm to be built close to my home, and the trenches created by the removal of peat would reach above a person’s shoulder, so there had obviously been a huge displacement of material.

I believe this problem will only increase because the Government, in their pursuit of net zero, have now proposed another 27 onshore wind farms across the United Kingdom, and they are giving incentives. Despite our being told that the price of wind power is going down, it actually went up in the last auction. Of course, wind farms are most suited to a certain type of upland, and it is very attractive to put them there. There is good wind, and the land itself is probably not all that valuable to farmers because it has quite a low agricultural value. Therefore, there is an economic incentive for farmers to allow, encourage and accept the locating of multiple wind turbines on such land. This problem has been caused, first, by Government policy, and secondly, by the kind of areas we are talking about and their suitability for these kinds of developments.

We have already heard about the value of peatlands, especially in upland areas. We have heard about the impact on drainage, wildlife, river systems and—this will be more important to others than to me—the release and storage of carbon dioxide. I take a different view from many others on the causes of climate change. It happens, but for multiple reasons, so we cannot identify only one cause.

The irony is that those who believe that the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is important are the very people who now encourage activities that release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. As has been pointed out, we cannot have wind farms on peatland areas without causing significant disruption through the digging of holes to put in huge amounts of concrete—the making of which also generates a lot of CO₂—the putting in of roads and the disruption to drainage. There is even the fact that the power must be taken through electricity cables that run across landscapes. All those things unavoidably lead to the release of CO₂, which is the very thing we are told that net zero policy is essential to prevent.

[Robbie Moore]

The right hon. Member is making an excellent speech. Another key challenge in building the turbines is the infrastructure, because a huge amount of aggregate to facilitate the piling of the foundations and road infrastructure must be brought in from elsewhere, which could be a long distance away. That is exactly the challenge we are finding at the Calderdale wind farm, where aggregate will have to be brought from miles away—nowhere near the actual proposal. Does the right hon. Member agree that this demonstrates why it is so ludicrous to have wind farm developments on protected peatland in areas that are not suitable?

[Sammy Wilson]

These are all issues that should be taken up during the planning process, and I am not sure that happens. When I have objected to wind farm applications in Northern Ireland, the answer has been, “This is a way of producing clean energy.” I do not even accept that argument. It is not clean, in the way in which the landscape has to be disrupted. Most of the steel for wind turbines is produced outside the country, from sources that produce it in less clean ways than we do. Anyone who has taken any interest in the matter will be appalled at the environmental and human degradation caused by extracting the rare earth metals required for these wind turbines.

We are currently spending huge amounts of money on a huge new electricity infrastructure because, instead of bringing power from one station, we are bringing it from stations spread all over the countryside, hence the investment in the infrastructure, which individuals are paying for through their monthly bills. I have heard the defence today that this is the cost of getting clean energy. We have to ask ourselves, “Is it even clean energy?” Is it any more environmentally friendly than some of our other methods? If we look at the carbon intensity of each machine used to produce the energy, an individual turbine is more carbon-intensive than a generator in a power station. All those factors are not taken into consideration.

To the Minister, and to those who support the whole policy of net zero and what must be done to achieve it, I say let us at least be honest with ourselves. Do these projects achieve what we want to achieve? If they do not, whether in our constituencies or somebody else’s, there should not be any hesitation in saying that they prevent us from achieving the goal that we want to achieve.

Maybe the Minister can enlighten us. When applying to build a road, all kinds of environmental assessments, et cetera, have to be done. Since these developments are designed to reduce carbon emissions, a proper carbon calculation should be done when a planning application is made. If that had been done, I suspect that many of these projects would not have been given permission, as their carbon output would have been greater than is acceptable. If we are to stop this, we must pay attention to the carbon output and ensure that planning permissions are predicated on a proper assessment.