Clean Power 2030 Action Plan: Rural Communities

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan upon rural communities.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have secured this debate and I look forward to hearing all contributions, particularly the maiden speech. I declare my interest as honorary president of National Energy Action and the UK Warehousing Association. I also serve on the Environment and Climate Change Committee.

The impact of clean energy on rural areas is potentially devastating, yet I would like to start off positively and look at the alternatives that would prevent this happening. The first is North Sea oil. Why are we importing oil and gas from Norway when we could produce from our own oilfields, which are entirely adjacent to theirs? Drilling for oil in the North Sea is good for UK jobs, tax income and the balance of payments. With a developed renewables sector, Denmark—I am half Danish and fairly closely follow developments there—has the largest oil and gas production in the EU. All sources of energy are joined up, which brings community benefits to residents.

Nuclear power is another alternative, and I look particularly favourably on smaller nuclear power stations, which are relatively quick to build, safe and efficient. Energy from waste would tackle two issues at once: disposing of household and light commercial waste, as well as heating homes and hot water for households and businesses. Solar panels could be built on rooftops, car parks and brownfield sites; I am very proud that the UK Warehousing Association is leading the way in this regard.

The future also could contain floating solar. Clean energy entails major concrete and other installations: it involves wind turbines and pylons, solar farms and battery storage plants, including inverters, transformers, substations and control rooms, and connection to the grid. It is often built on prime agricultural land and causes tensions between farmers and developers. A judicial review is under way, involving around 500 Welsh farmers and landowners, many of whom face losing farmland, homes and livelihoods to a proposed 200-kilometre pylon scheme stretching across several counties and into the West Midlands. These facilities amount to creeping urbanisation.

Currently, applications for North Yorkshire alone include East Cowton, Light Valley Solar in South Milford, Hillam, East Appleton, Masham and Swinton, East Rounton, and Scotton and Lingerfield. Many of these are integrated BES schemes, with a horrendous array of solar panels, integrators, battery storage and all the things referred to above. This is an unacceptable cumulative impact of various forms of clean energy.

In one instance, that of Scotton and Lingerfield, the developers acknowledge the very real risk of a fire and a need for evacuation, and a real risk of a smoke plume reaching a nursery. These facilities are inherently unsafe as they are highly combustible and flammable, with fire risks from solar panels themselves and even more so from battery storage units. In many cases, these are positioned simply too close to residential homes, schools, nurseries and other businesses.

It is staggering that fire and rescue services are not statutory consultees. They are not formally consulted on site engineering and the positioning of facilities, or the resources in terms of water, equipment and manpower required in the event of a fire. This is despite the intrinsic unsafety of such flammable sites.

In addition, these sites require wind turbines and overhead pylons criss-crossing the countryside to bring the energy generated to London and the south-east. These are highly intrusive, environmentally unfriendly and wasteful, as energy is lost in such transmission. In any event, pylons transporting energy long distance via vulnerable overhead power lines are environmentally challenging, can be damaging to birds and wildlife, and are wasteful and hideous. This is an ecological scandal in the making.

In particular, when it comes to the end of life of clean energy infrastructure, how will it be decommissioned and disposed of in an environmentally safe way? Will a bond be taken out from the applicants in each case to cover the cost of restoring the site after 40 years, or in the event of a developer failing before that time? Many environmental groups, including the CPRE—the Campaign to Protect Rural England—deeply regret the impact on the countryside, residents and livestock.

Offshore wind farms threaten the marine life that is the very lifeblood of marine areas. Many argue that, in view of the potential damage, there is a strong case for a moratorium on new applications for offshore wind farms until there is a better understanding of these issues.

One of the worst aspects of these facilities is the impact on farming, food and production. The Government have admitted that it will potentially take 10% of farmland out of food production. What assessment have the Government made of the impact on food security and food production of their clean energy proposals at this stage? We are roughly 60% self-sufficient in food, but this is challenging. We are only 18% self-sufficient in fruit and only 55% self-sufficient in vegetables. The majority of these are imported.

Moreover, current levels of debt per household are high and increasing, amounting to a total of £5.5 billion in February this year. The arrears represent around 75% of the total of all unpaid energy bills. Energy spending by households and businesses is increasing. We are paying for infrastructure use in advance before it has even been constructed. This is the only utility to do so, piling costs in the form of energy levies and high standing charges over which households have no control.

Continuing the Danish theme, in the fairy tale by HC Andersen, as we call him in Denmark, the emperor has no clothes. Everyone feared the emperor and wanted to display loyalty, so they praised his garments, but, in truth, he was wandering around in his underwear. Only a young boy was brave enough to tell the truth: that the emperor was indeed wearing no clothes. I am being very brave today in saying to the Minister and the Government that this is wrong.

The Minister will respond by saying that clean energy is safe, sustainable and reliable for our energy. I disagree. Many of the clean energy sites are intrinsically unsafe, highly flammable and combustible. They are not reliable, as when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine we are left powerless. I urge the Government to look closely and positively at the alternatives. Renewables are, in practice, potentially wasteful, lose energy in transmission and bring no significant community benefits. They amount to the creeping urbanisation of the countryside. The proposals contained in the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan are premature, ill-thought-out and potentially devastating for rural communities and their residents, livestock and nature. The proposals are unravelling rapidly. They need to be revisited.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I am not accusing the Minister in any way of misleading the House, because this is from a different department, but the actual figure that was consulted on by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in January 2025 was that more than 10% of farmland in England was to be diverted towards helping to achieve net zero and protecting wildlife by 2050. That was in the consultation that was the prelude to the land use framework and I understand was in parallel to this net zero policy.

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I am happy to write to the noble Baroness to clear up that exact point, but what I quoted from, as I am sure she will know, is the actual land use framework and not the precursors to it. At the final point when it was published by Defra, it came to the conclusion that I have mentioned. It is in table 1 on page 19 of that land use framework, so it can be looked at. I am very happy to write further to the noble Baroness on that particular point.

What is absolutely right, though, as indicated in the contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Gill, is that we are basically all in this together. It cannot be the case that we can exempt parts of the country from the energy revolution taking place in front of us. But what we can do is make sure that, where it has effects on those areas, they are mitigated as far as possible: for example, as we are planning at the moment, they will have community benefits coming their way from those changes. Community investment through the discount schemes is also coming forward. A new electricity bill discount scheme will provide £2,500 over the next decade to households living within 500 metres of new and significantly upgraded transmission infrastructure, with the first payments expected in 2027.

We are also looking seriously at community benefit from upcoming changes to grid systems and various things. The SSEN’s upcoming Tealing to Aberdeenshire transmission line, for example, could mean funding of more than £23 million for local communities. There is assistance for communities that are associated with those changes, but also an understanding that, while those changes have to be made very carefully—with full consultation and appreciation of the difficulties that may stand in the way of some of those schemes—where those schemes go ahead, they have done so on the basis of our Planning and Infrastructure Act. That means full scrutiny and consultation, full arrangements for remediation and a full consideration of what, among other things, the cumulative effect on the landscape may turn out to be.

With that, I hope I have addressed the points made by most noble Lords. If I have failed to do that because of time constraints, I am happy to write, particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Howell, to go a little further on the question of hydrogen for the future. I can assure him that it plays a very substantial role in the process, along with other non-variable things such as biomethane and biogas, for the future of the energy economy.

Overall, the Government are doing a responsible job in trying to match the requirements of the clean power action plan with quality of life and the future, particularly of rural communities. We will certainly continue to take that very carefully into consideration as the plan develops and, indeed, as clean power goes beyond 2030 and into the next decades.