Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

I think that is right. The HSE, on its own website, refers to the fact that it cannot comment on every application and, in effect, needs to be proactively contacted only if there is considered to be a major risk.

I am also conscious that the River Test is considered by my honourable friend Caroline Nokes to be under threat. For people who are interested in these things, I commend the speech of my right honourable friend Sir Alec Shelbrooke, who talked about dendrites. It was a very knowledgeable, well-researched speech about fire risk, including thermal runaway and the like.

Coming back to the fundamental proposal of my noble friend Lord Forsyth, he specifically asked me to talk about safety. There is a concern about overdevelopment and the loss of food for agricultural production. We will keep coming back to this on this side of the House, recognising the importance of food security alongside the other elements of national security.

On the amendment that I have tabled, perhaps I should declare an interest as this is about a subject that I have referred to a few times before: energy substations. Again, I am worried. There is an element here of thinking about where we do energy generation or other aspects of interconnection. Frankly, if the Government think the only way they can get these things done is by ripping apart environmental protection law and reducing food production land, they should not connect at those areas that already have these environmental designations or are key producers of food in this country.

My amendment refers specifically to 1, 2 or 3. I am conscious that the best and most versatile land is traditionally grades 1, 2 and 3a. However, Defra, through Natural England, does not publish where grades 3a and 3b are, because apparently that is too difficult to do, as it requires individual local site surveys on determining whether a particular field is grade 3a or 3b, so for comprehensiveness I have put in grades 1, 2 and 3.

However, as my noble friend Lord Fuller has pointed out, there is an element here about the fact that, frankly, a lot of this stuff was—in effect, with a light touch—reconsidered only in 2010. Fundamental parts of our land have not been assessed in terms of their contribution towards food production or food security for probably the best part of 40 to 50 years. As a consequence, recognising the targets set by the Government and the challenges that we face, I am conscious of the land use framework. Admittedly, I did a draft of that nearly three years ago, and I am sure everyone is frustrated that we still have not seen it yet. One of the challenges is this competing element of what we do with the land that we have.

Let us be straightforward about this: once agricultural land is gone, it is gone for good. I am not blaming farmers or landowners, who, candidly, the policies of the last 12 months have given even more reason to get a secured income on the basis of the value or use of their land. One of the foibles, in a way, of doing things such as leasing out land for solar is that it does not adjust in terms of the agricultural elements of inheritance tax. However, when farmers can get a guaranteed income for a proportion of their land, while other things are so uncertain, I do not blame them for wanting to make that choice.

My honourable friends—apologies, I am still earning about this place; I should have said my noble friends—have eloquently put some of the issues around solar. There definitely has to be a place for solar across our country, but one final point that I want to make on battery energy systems is that we really need to target where they are going to be. There is no point in having batteries in parts of the country that are nowhere near the grid or near where most of the energy is going to be used. That is why I have proposed the amendments I have today.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I simply want to agree with Amendment 89 in the name of my noble friend Lady Hodgson of Abinger. I prefer it to the amendments from my noble friends Lord Fuller, Lord Forsyth and Lady Coffey, although they all have merit. We have heard from my noble friend Lady Coffey that we may already have enough solar farms under consent already, although I am not sure what the Minister thinks of that.

As the House of Lords, we can take a longer-term view and, unfashionable though it may be, I believe we should protect the highest-quality agricultural land for farming and food and prohibit solar farms on that land. It is of course less costly for the developers, who want flat sites, but that is not a good reason to sacrifice the best land needed for food security.

Government is about balance. Our population is growing. We live in a dangerous world that could one day jeopardise imports of food, and the most productive land should be devoted to growing crops.

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This infrastructure is critical to connect and transport our own homegrown clean electricity. It will create good jobs, support economic growth, bring down bills, tackle the climate crisis and get us off the rollercoaster of global gas prices for good. For these reasons, I trust that noble Lords understand that these amends are not necessary and I kindly ask that the noble Baroness withdraws her amendment.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Can the Minister not deal with the problem of patches of best-quality land on a site with a classic de minimis rule of, say, 5%? That would still allow us to protect the best land without needless delay and Defra—or the new framework that the Minister mentioned—could easily provide the data for that purpose.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am sure that if the noble Baroness wished to put that forward in the land use framework it would be considered. I always worry about de minimis rules because there will always be the exception to the rule that goes slightly over it, and then you end up with a big problem sorting that out. However, if she wishes to feed that into Defra’s part of the land use framework consultation, I am sure it will take account of it.