Large-scale Solar Farms

Debate between Caroline Johnson and Greg Smith

Thursday 18th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right on that point. It is almost as if he had been looking over my shoulder and seeing what was on the next page of my speech. I was coming to precisely that. Overpaid surveyors, the so-called experts who come in with a clear mandate of what they have to do, have been hired to test soil quality. They do not even go out into the middle of the field. They do not go to the most versatile part of the farm where the crop actually grows. We have caught them red-handed in Buckinghamshire testing the headland, the very edge of the field, They will always get a lower score from that test if they have not gone to the bit of the field where the crop grows. They deliberately test the edge of fields and the headland to get the poorer quality result. This would not be a speech from me without mentioning this: it is the same tactic that HS2’s contractors use in other parts of my constituency to get similar results to prove similar points. It is not unique to solar developers.

[Dr Johnson]

Has my hon. Friend compared the land results proposed by the surveyors with the maps that DEFRA produces of what it expects the land to be and noticed the differences?

[Greg Smith]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Yes, time and again we see a differential between what the developer’s surveyor and consultant come up with and what we believe the land to be. Much of my constituency sits on a blue clay base, so we expect a lot of it to be 3b. However, I come back to the point that I made: 3b land can be very good productive land producing the sorts of yields that I talked about. It is how that land has been farmed, often for generations, that dictates how good it is for production, not other things.

I made this point earlier: 60% of farms in the UK are tenant farms. However, beyond that, it is not just the farmers, the tenants or those employed on the farms who are hurt when that land is taken away from food production, but the packing plants, the equipment suppliers and the distributors. A huge part of our rural and national economy is hit when food production is diminished.

For the surrounding communities, the loss of farmland by no means starts or ends with solar panels. In the Claydons, for example, my constituents have suffered hugely from large-scale construction already, including a number of big housing estates, East West Rail and the ultimate destroyer, HS2. It is a daily struggle for them to get to work, school, the hospital, the GP or the shops without coming up against the obstacles of endless road closures, broken stretches of road that have become dangerous after the movement of thousands of HGVs, drivers travelling to and from nearby compounds, and severe light pollution during the winter months. That will be the same all over again with the construction of the huge solar farms. A solar farm of 2,100 acres is not built overnight. They are all put on concrete bases. There will be piling in places. The construction impact on local communities is considerable.

After all the disruption that my constituents have already taken—and are still taking—from those big national infrastructure projects, this once quiet corner of Buckinghamshire is now expected to take, in the case of Rosefield, a 2,100 acre development, which would dwarf the amount of land that High Speed 2 has taken in Buckinghamshire. Given the extent of the proposed site, it is not unreasonable to expect to see yet more of the same disruption that has plagued the Claydons for years. All of that comes without any commitment by the promoters to fix any of the damaged roads, which already have to be patched by the council, even though other people have broken them. It is simply not fair for my constituents and areas such as the Claydons to foot all that pain all over again.

It is not just the panels that consume vast amounts of countryside. The infrastructure needed to carry the electricity generated through to the grid swallows up yet more. It is no coincidence that adjacent to the proposed Rosefield site, there is a proposed battery storage facility, with the equivalent of 90 shipping containers of battery storage right next door. That is more food-producing land being sacrificed, and the facility itself poses a major fire risk in an area where the emergency services are already struggling, in the face of such disruptive amounts of construction work, to get to any emergencies that occur.

Let that be a warning to any community where solar is coming. It does not end with just the solar panels. Of course, there is no community benefit whatsoever from solar development, whether large or small. As has been said, there is no cheap electricity for local residents or businesses, and no support systems in place for those impacted by construction. There is no recourse for anybody affected.

I have spoken a lot about Rosefield, but I will briefly talk about some other large-scale solar developments in my constituency. In the south, we have seen an equally blatant tactic—admittedly, on a slightly smaller scale—of significant ground-based solar installations being installed or proposed just metres from each other. Let us take the proposed solar installation near the village of Kimblewick on the eastern side of the village of Ford, and Callie’s Solar Farm on the western side of Ford, which combined, would be the second largest land take in my constituency after Rosefield for ground-mounted panels. We have seen that tactic time and again; it puts community and local authority resources under strain, in turn diminishing their influence over the whole planning process. We have to find a way to ensure that the cumulative impact of solar farms is taken into account.