Energy: Wind Farms

Lord Williams of Elvel Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Williams of Elvel]

My Lords, the House will be most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, for introducing this subject and for concentrating on the theme of localism, which I want to follow up on because it is vitally important. It is a matter that has got slightly confused over the years. Let me start with TAN 8, which the noble Lord introduced us to.

TAN 8 went through a consultation process, a recent analysis of which has shown that 66 per cent of consultees opposed it and 7 per cent were in favour. Even at its promulgation, TAN 8 was unpopular with all the consultees who the Welsh Assembly Government had invited to comment. That went through to the selection of the SSAs. These strategic search areas were identified by a Danish company, Arup, on the grounds of simple criteria. Social conditions were not part of the criteria to identify them. The result was that we had three SSAs in mid-Wales, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, quite rightly points out—they were B, C and D, to be technical about it—where the criteria were basically the number of people who did not live there; that is, the most beautiful wildernesses in mid-Wales.

The result of TAN 8, curiously enough, has been slightly perverse. It was designed to stop what is known as pepper-potting, with wind turbines being put up all over Wales, and to concentrate on serious and strategic areas. The problem with that, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, has pointed out, is that this gave rise to large applications because if you were going to try and meet the targets which the Welsh Assembly Government had set in terms of carbon emissions from Wales, you had to make sure that the applications were of large sizes. The result is that we have a number of applications—I will not go through the whole list—with, for example, 160 megawatts, 150 megawatts, 140 megawatts or 170 megawatts of installed capacity. It is a long list and the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, has given us a graphic idea of the total, so what happens then?

What happens is that these applications are outside the control of the Welsh Assembly Government, the local authority and local people, so they come to Westminster—originally under the Electricity Act 1989 but now, because of rearrangements in the planning mechanisms, these applications would come through the Infrastructure Planning Commission. We read in the Localism Bill that that commission is to be abolished, so that it will become an infrastructure planning inspectorate inside the general inspectorate. The ultimate decision would be for a Secretary of State. I have no quarrel with that remedy but I have a quarrel about which Secretary of State would be responsible for this—I follow the noble Lord, Lord Thomas. Would it be the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who sits for an English constituency? Would it be the Secretary of State for Wales, who sits for an English constituency? Would it be the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who sits for an English constituency? In any way, it would be determined by somebody who has no particular interest in ensuring the benefits of mid-Wales.

We had an example of this in the previous Government, which I attacked then and would attack now. The wind farm at Cefn Croes, in the middle of the Cambrian Mountains—one of the most beautiful places in the world, let alone the United Kingdom—was opposed by every planning authority in mid-Wales. It went to London and one of my colleagues in the Westminster Government simply signed it off. Did he go and visit the site? No. Did he consult with various people? No. It was simple ideology: he wanted to ensure that there was enough capacity in whatever it was, however it was done. It is that which we must avoid.

What happens when an application for a wind farm of over 50 megawatts of installed capacity comes to the Secretary of State? Will he or she look at the criteria that Arup introduced to define these selected areas? What is important, wilderness and wind speed or social conditions and communities? What happens when the Secretary of State receives the application and says, “I’m not bothered about mid-Wales. That is not my interest at all”? We have to ensure that localism means something rather than simply being a theory. It would be perfectly possible to ensure by some mechanism or other that localism actually counted, and I hope very much that the Minister will give us that reassurance.