Great British Energy Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Boycott

Report stage
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendment 53, which seeks to ensure that the voices of local people are heard when proposals are made or encouraged by GB Energy for renewable energy projects that impact on local areas. This is a group about community involvement and consultation, and how people might have their say. I regret to say that, in so many cases, local people have been airbrushed from the debate, which has been conducted above their heads. We build resentment, scepticism and resistance when local people are denied their say. I speak with authority when I say that the NSIP system is being systematically abused by developers of solar farms, who string together otherwise stand-alone and discrete proposals for small-scale solar and aggregate them together as a device to somehow creep over the threshold. The voices of the local planning authority, locally elected representatives, local people and business are excised from the record.

The NSIP system was designed to allow truly exceptional and impactful infrastructure projects to be considered in the national context. I completely support that principle, but I see in my own area, for example, that one proposal, extending to 1,100 hectares but covering 40 square kilometres and at least a dozen separate landowners some 15 miles apart, has been cobbled together in the crudest and most cynical manner to creep over that 100-megawatt capacity line. It undermines public confidence in our planning system and acts as a recruiting sergeant for conspiracy theorists and their superficial, fundamentalist views. We will all become tainted and tarred by their brush while we deny the public due process and a proper say on these schemes, which should be decided locally but are not.

Later, on Amendments 50 and 52, I will say that solar should not be permitted on the best and most versatile land—grades 1 to 3A. I recognise that other land could be used for large-scale renewables, but we need to exercise care and caution. Even grade 4 or grade 5 land has a value, but that is more likely to include amenity value, outstanding landscape contribution or wider social benefit, perhaps in areas of outstanding natural beauty or other designations. It is for that reason that, for all land—even in cases where land may be at the poorer end of agricultural quality—changes in use to renewables more widely should be consulted on for residents within a 20-mile buffer of the widest proposed land extent. My amendment provides for this stipulation.

It is because the NSIP system is being abused and has fallen into disrepute that I have brought this amendment to repair the damage and indignation that local people rightly feel. We are storing up some terrible problems if the political class structurally sidelines views in an unthinking dash for renewables and fails to consider those wider impacts.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly too to speak to my Amendment 22. I am very grateful for all the support of so many noble Lords, and I am thrilled to be standing here after so many attempts to get community energy into the statute books. I note the work of Power for People, which has done a fantastic job over the years to make this happen.

Following on from the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, my sister has lived in Denmark for over 50 years now and she has had a financial stake in a wind farm for a very long time. She gets good, reliable, cheap energy. They really like it; it makes you feel like part of something.

I do not support the Liberal Democrats’ amendment that GB Energy should have to pay for all the home insulation, but I am extremely worried about where this money is going to come from. I do not see a place. We all understand that we have to do something about homes, for all the many reasons that the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, set out, yet there seems to be a bit of a black hole, as we call it, in this department. You cannot get everything out of the GB Energy fund, and it is right that it should be ring-fenced around the actual production of the new green fuels that we all need, but there needs to be a be a really tough plan. I would be very interested to know what the Government have in store.