Large-scale Solar Farms

David Davis Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Dr Johnson]

I certainly think that local people should have more say in what happens in their area in this regard, but I am cautious about having a solar strategy for each area. In areas such as Lincolnshire with high volumes of food-producing land, it may not be appropriate to have any massive-scale solar plants.

The loss of good-quality arable land at a time of unstable world trade situations is a first-rate folly, particularly when other infinitely more sensible sites are available, such as brownfield sites, domestic roofs and commercial rooftops. This should worry everybody wherever they live, which is why it is disappointing, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) said, that the Benches are full of Conservative Members but no Liberal Democrats or Labour people with any interest in food security have turned up. Food security is important for those who live in cities, too.

Does the Minister agree that the Government urgently need to produce a joined-up land use strategy? Will he update the House on what the Government are doing to encourage the use of brownfield sites, poor-quality land, and the roofs of warehouses and industrial buildings? What discussions is he having with energy suppliers regarding the balance between standing charges and usage costs in order to incentivise the installation of solar panels on industrial units?

There is a long backlog of people waiting for grid connection. What plans does the Minister have for grid connection prioritisation for those using brownfield sites or industrial and domestic roofs? Such connections are prohibitively expensive, which is also driving the spread of massive-scale solar farms. What assessment has he made of the actual costs of the connections rather than the charged costs?

On the concept of efficiency, Hinkley Point C, which is currently under construction in Somerset, will take up 174 hectares and is expected to produce 26 TWh of electricity per year for 60 years. In comparison, Springwell Solar Farm, which is in my constituency, will be almost 25 times the size of Hinkley Point C, but will produce only 950,000 MWh of electricity per year, which is just shy of 1 TWh per year, for 40 years. That is 25 times the size for 25 times less energy, for less time.

[Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I will return to Yorkshire later, but on the more strategic point, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) quite rightly talked about this issue being a matter of balance, and my hon. Friend is highlighting what we are paying per terawatt-hour for solar power. Other countries, most particularly Germany, that have depended on a balance of solar power and wind have found themselves being let down completely by the system. The Germans even have a word, “dunkelflaute”, for when there is cloud and no wind. They have had years in which they have had serious electricity deficits. So although we all agree that solar power is an important part of the Government’s repertoire, as it were, it is not the overall answer.

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[Dr Johnson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. He summarises large parts of my speech succinctly.

Another issue that I want to raise is that although large-scale solar may technically be classified as clean energy, many tell me that the companies that supply it are neither morally clean nor environmentally green. My hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton had an Adjournment debate earlier this week in which she made an interesting but rather disturbing speech relating to the use of forced labour in supply chains of solar panels. Her debate highlighted the fact that many solar panels also use vast quantities of coal in their supply chain.

Fosse Green—one of the organisations trying to muscle in on rural Lincolnshire—appears as a British company, but its structure is rather complex. It is actually a joint venture involving two established solar developers: Windel Energy and Recurrent Energy. The latter is, according to the firm itself, the

“wholly-owned subsidiary of Canadian Solar incorporated”.

As highlighted by my hon. Friend, Canadian Solar gets its panels almost exclusively from China, where about 60% of the grid is accounted for by coal-powered energy plants. The plants will have a significant carbon footprint of their own, and once the panels are produced they will have to be transported to and within the UK on ships and lorries powered by hydrocarbons.

The other allegations made against Canadian Solar, which I understand the Minister will be investigating, are particularly worrying. What are the Government doing to investigate the actual benefit of solar projects, taking into account the panels’ production, transportation, regular cleaning and ultimate disposal, and to ensure that we are not complicit in the use of forced labour?

It is self-evident that the companies have little time for the views of those who will be most affected by them. I recently conducted a survey in my constituency in the areas most affected by large-scale NSIP applications. Letters were sent directly to thousands of households in Sleaford and North Hykeham, and I received over 2,000 handwritten responses. These were not simple online forms that could be clicked and submitted multiple times; they were thought-out responses, many of which contained pages—and I mean pages—of heartfelt comments. Of the respondents, 90% were concerned about the enormous scale of the proposals, 68% were extremely concerned about the use of productive farmland, and 55% were extremely concerned about the visual impact.

The accusation often levelled against people who are against the proposals but have to live next to the projects is that this is merely nimbyism: “We like solar panels, but just not next to us.” Actually, although visual impact was a considerable factor in the responses, the far greater concern was about the loss of productive farmland. A significant proportion of my constituents are veterans, serving military personnel and those who work in agriculture, and they more than anyone else understand the extreme importance of food security. The most common response was that we must protect our prime agricultural land in the interests of food security.

That said, I also have sympathy with the aesthetic arguments. Lincolnshire is a particularly beautiful county, and the countryside has inspired much of our nation’s best art and literature. Lincolnshire’s pre-eminent literary figure, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, felt his deepest sympathies for an unaltered rural England, and found himself a stranger in the rapidly changing industrial and mercantile world of 19th-century England. His work remains remarkably relevant to our situation today. His much-loved poem “The Brook”, a memorable personification of a stream, ends with the following lines:

“For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.”

What do we allow to go on forever? Do we allow the industrialisation of our countryside, or do we honour the landscape that has inspired so much of our great literature? Edmund Burke noticed that happiness is the promise of beauty, and it is clear that rural communities will be far unhappier after being deprived of the natural beauty of their surroundings.

Solar prospectors often hide behind claims that their panels will be hidden from public view, but that is often not the case. The panels are often more than 4 metres tall—twice the height of the tallest gentleman here—and especially visible from higher areas. Even in a relatively flat area like Lincolnshire, enormous solar seas such as the Fosse Green project could be seen from the limestone cliff running down the county. Their glint and glare could disturb any onlookers, and they are a particularly big threat to our national treasure, the Red Arrows.

[Sir David Davis]

I will stand to my full height. May I address the issue of the dismissive attitude behind the word “nimbyism”? Many people who live in these parts of the countryside—in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and the rest—moved there because of the environment. They go there for a peaceful retirement, because they would like to work there or because they want their children to grow up in a good environment. It is distinctly unconservative— to use a phrase frequently used at the moment—to dismiss peoples’ property rights as nimbyism. They bought their view. They placed themselves and invested their savings in the environment that we are talking about. When we take it away, we should not just dismiss it as nimbyism.

[Dr Johnson]

Unsurprisingly, I quite agree with my right hon. Friend. It is important that we represent the constituents we are sent here to represent. If they are unhappy with solar farms being put in front of their houses, whether that is because the farms are on productive farmland or because they ruin the environment in which they live, we are here to represent those concerns.

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[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Henderson. I thank and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on securing what is a very important debate for many counties around the country, not least Buckinghamshire.

Since I was elected in 2019, the threat of large-scale solar developments has caused significant concern for me and my constituents. Across my Buckingham constituency, field after field and farm after farm have already been blanketed by solar panels, to the detriment of the surrounding communities, food security, nature and our beautiful landscape. While we must strive towards a more sustainable and secure energy strategy, that does not and cannot include the huge sacrifice of agricultural land that we have already made and many plan to make in pursuit of that lofty goal.

Within the 335 square miles of rural Buckinghamshire that I am lucky enough to represent, a total of 3,600 acres of land has been either allocated to or planned for solar farms. That is 1.5 times larger than the entirety of Heathrow airport.

The largest proposed industrial solar installation, Rosefield, which sits among the villages known as the Claydons, dwarfs the size of the nearby town of Buckingham —a town of more than 10,000 residents. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Buckinghamshire countryside is slowly being consumed by solar panels. Does it benefit anybody locally? No, it does not—not when we consider the construction impact, the visual impact, the risk to wildlife and the risk to the local economy and our tourism economy.

Buckinghamshire is lucky enough to have stunning, beautiful countryside that people come to walk through; they then spend their money in our cafes, bars, hotels and campsites. I am not sure that they will still want to do that if the landscape is just covered in the glass, metal and plastic of these solar farms. Not that the promoters and developers of such schemes as Rosefield in the Claydons, Callie’s near Owlswick, Bourton in Buckingham, Redborough in Ledburn and many others that I could mention, care about any of those points, of course.

And does it benefit our country? No, not when our food security is at grave risk of being severely compromised, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham has outlined, through the enormous loss of agricultural land that each of these developments represents when taken cumulatively.

No matter how big or small, all agricultural land repurposed is not only food lost, but livelihoods lost. This is land that would have been farmed for generations beforehand, often by tenant farmers, who are given no choice but to leave, without any meaningful say in the process or, indeed, any compensation.

[Sir David Davis]

My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech and makes a very good point about tenant farmers. Is not one of the problems the way that we have set up the pricing of these mechanisms, in that it renders tenant farmers completely uneconomical? For some foreign investor with vast investments in the British countryside, it is in their interest to throw tenant farmers out in favour of this policy.

[Greg Smith]

As ever, my right hon. Friend hits the nail precisely on the head. The risk to tenant farmers through the pricing mechanisms that we are seeing—through the sheer plain economics—is severely stacked against their interests. We must look at the volume of farms in this country that are tenanted rather than owned; the more tenant farms we lose, the greater the slide in domestic food security we will see, and the current figure of around 60% of self-sufficiency will drop very rapidly indeed. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right.

To achieve the set target of 75 GW from solar installations by 2035, more than 300,000 acres across the country would be required. It is no secret that the rural economy, under pressure from, for example, rising input prices and many other things, has already faced significant challenges in recent years. Left with no viable options, some people have been forced to sell or leave their land, in the process guaranteeing that it will almost certainly never return to food-producing status. Yet across all of those estates—the farms and all of that land—the barn roofs are empty and blank.

Smaller stand-alone solar is less impactful, quicker and easier to install, does not risk damaging the local infrastructure and provides an additional, reliable source of income for struggling farms. I am in no way saying that farmers with 10, 20 or 30 acres of unproductive land should not, in consultation with their local planning authority and local communities, be able to utilise land that is not useful for producing food any more. They should be able to put solar on their rooftops. But the fundamental point is that no amount of solar will revive the fortunes of some of the farms that are struggling —quite the opposite.

Time and again I hear the baseless argument from developers—this point has already been developed in this debate—that anything less than grade 3a land should be given over because they believe it to be incapable of growing food. I disagree. Grade 3b land can be very productive; I know that, because the bulk of my constituency that sits in the vale of Aylesbury sits on blue clay. That means the vast majority of it gets a grade 3b land rating, but it remains perfectly capable in many cases, having been nurtured, loved and looked after for generations, of producing 10-tonne-a-hectare wheat harvests. Many farmers in other parts of the country on grade 2 land or even grade 1 land would bite their right hand off to get such a yield at harvest time.

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[Sir David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on securing the debate. It has been apparent from listening to it how important an issue this is. She made a brilliant and comprehensive speech, and other hon. Members have filled in all the details, so I will be fairly brief.

The current policy on large-scale solar farms fails to take into account the country’s landscape and environment. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) rightly said in his intervention on my hon. Friend, this is a matter of balance. This policy is badly designed and does not deliver any sense of balance. I suspect that that is largely because of the dead hand of the Treasury, but I will come back to that in a moment.

We have heard a series of horror stories, the latest from my old friend, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). I felt a sense of horror when he talked about 10,000 acres being under these nightmarish destroyers of the countryside. Of course, the Government’s national infrastructure tracker shows 26 of these huge projects. One such project by a company called Boom Power is close to me in East Yorkshire, and it alone covers 3,500 acres. That is hard for most people to imagine, but that is 2,000 football fields or, as somebody said, about 1.5 times the size of Heathrow airport—virtually from here to the horizon in most directions. While sitting here, I saw that the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) was speaking in the main Chamber; it is about the size of the city of Durham—a city with a population of 50,000 people. Imagine how long we would spend considering a planning application for houses for 50,000 people—that would never happen, of course, but that is what we are dealing with.

Despite the fact that solar panels change the character, use and appearance of the landscape they seek to carpet, whoever drafted the policy did not have any concept of the rights of local individuals. In effect, because of the national infrastructure rules, the bigger and more damaging the project, the less say local people have. It is an astonishing perversion of natural justice.

Whoever designed the policy also did not take into account the other thought process of the developers: that they would seek to put them near hubs in the national grid, which means that not only do we get enormous solar farms, but we get lots of them in a single area. The proximity of the Drax power station is the reason for the one being proposed in my constituency, and it means that there is a proliferation of solar panels next door in Selby and in the other East Yorkshire and North Yorkshire seats. Five villages are being penalised in my constituency and another five or 10 villages are being penalised in the next constituency and the one after—they are all in one place.

As I said earlier in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham, we dismiss such people as nimbys. It is their lives and their life savings—maybe their children’s life savings—that we are damaging. In doing this, we should keep in mind what we might call the importance of individual property rights.

There are countless more innovative policies that could be implemented. The one that seems to be most popular today as an alternative is to legislate either to massively incentivise or even to mandate in some cases the use of the roofs of all new buildings—certainly all new industrial buildings, warehouses and barns and, frankly, houses too. Over the last 20 years of energy policy, the Government have changed the economics to make various things different. Solar farms are now more economic than they were 20 years ago and wind farms are more economic than they were 20 years ago.

The creation of a requirement to use roofs would engender a new industry. Elon Musk already has new designs for solar cells that look like tiles on buildings. We would therefore do away with the concerns over the aesthetic effect and, if the Government did that, they would become cheaper and cheaper. I say to the Minister that there is need for some imagination and for us to say to ourselves, “What do we want this to look like in 10 years’ time?” Then, we can design the policies to encourage the industry to deliver just that.

I will be brief on the effects on farming because they have been talked through quite a lot. As I believe my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough said, farmland is already a solar farm, in that it turns sunlight into food. It is much better, more useful and more flexible and effective than using it for electricity. We now have less farmland in production than we have had at any time since 1945—since the second world war. That date is important in this context because, in these dangerous times, do we really think it is sensible that we have to import almost half—46%—of our food? In the event of a serious breakdown of international trade—not even necessarily in the context of a continental war—which has happened a couple of times already through covid and Ukraine, our ability to access food becomes a real problem. We had a rehearsal during covid of some of that. It is not wise.

There was a lot of coverage in the papers over the last few days of the King installing 2,000 panels at Sandringham to create cheaper electricity for himself. Do Members know what 2,000 panels amount to? Five acres, or one seven-hundredth of the plan that I have been talking about, and one two-hundredth of the 10,000 acres that my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough talked about earlier. Small scale is fine—even 100 or 200 acres properly placed are fine—but what we are getting now is huge industrialisation of the countryside and that simply is not fine. In my part of the world, I have the villages of Spaldington, Willitoft, Brind, Gribthorpe and Foggathorpe, where there is a plan to basically surround all those people with solar cells, and their future environments are being thwarted by that.

I had not intended to talk about the effect of the Treasury, but since we have a very smart Minister here I will make one philosophical point to him. When the Treasury sets out to determine which policy works best—I speak from long, sore experience as a Minister in the past—its driving concern, in essence, is cheapness, low cost and minimising the taxes required to run it. That is understandable—it is what those in the Treasury are paid for—but because the Treasury is so powerful, that overwhelms what ought to affect the decision, which an economist would call a cost-benefit analysis. In other words, what is the cost to the state and to the citizens and individuals who must cope with it? My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough mentioned what happened to house prices, for example, and we know what it does to people’s environments. We have a policy in respect of which the second component has been completely ignored. That is what I mean by the dead hand of the Treasury.

When the Minister comes to have the arguments about that in his Department, which I hope he will have, he should talk about a proper cost-benefit analysis. When we look at the energy costs of a photovoltaic cell, we should look not just at the cost here, but at the cost to make it, the coal cost, the cost of oppressing Uyghurs and so on. In terms of the overall policy, we should look at the impact on everybody and on local land and housing values. If the Minister does that, he will come up with a completely different policy.

Coming back to the simpler arguments, I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough on his call effectively for a ban on solar farms on green belt and proper, flexible land, which includes 3b land. I live in the countryside in my constituency, and I am surrounded by 3a and 3b land. I cannot tell the difference, and neither can the farmers who farm it. That is where we are. When it comes to the 3,500 acres that I talked about, they do not know the difference either. As we have heard, the only rule we have is that of the assessors, paid for by the investors in the farm.

I support an unequivocal ban on large solar farms on the green belt and the UK’s best and most agricultural land, including 3b land, and strong incentives for developments to use rooftops, brownfield land and poorer-quality, unproductive land. As we heard earlier from my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough, the Minister will get the argument back from the Treasury that it is more expensive to use brownfield land and rooftops. The counter-argument is simply this: it is more expensive only in the first element—the taxpayer element. It is not more expensive if we look at the dangerous impact on the lives, livelihoods, savings, investments and housing of the people we represent.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Henderson, in this important debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on securing the debate and being wise enough to persuade the Backbench Business Committee to devote an entire three hours to it, recognising the strength of feeling that right hon. and hon. Members have. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on his previous work, never mind on his speech today, because I know that he has been pivotal in trying to ensure that aspects of planning policy are adapted, recognising the impact on the land we have today.

Why are we in this situation? Quite a considerable discussion has already happened about different classifications of land and the return on land. Ultimately, as a Conservative Government and a Conservative party, we want to ensure that we achieve net zero and recognise the balance that we need in our energy mix, which will continue to need the use of fossil fuels for many decades to come. We must ensure that we are on that sustainable journey to electricity generation both locally and nationally in that regard. It is important that solar has a role to play in that but, as has been accurately pointed out, one of the aspects that understandably concerns people is that all too often the economics of some of the plans that the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and its predecessor Departments set off on lead to quite a different outcome from that expected.

It goes back to the Labour Government: in trying to encourage people with feed-in tariffs to go on to roofs, they massively incorrectly calculated what would happen. That led to Chris Huhne, the then Lib Dem Energy Secretary, having to basically curtail the plan—I think it may have been the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey) who actually killed it off entirely—because frankly the budget had already been blown. That is important in some of the considerations that we need to think about, and that is why it is really important that the Government have an agile approach to understanding how different offers are taken up. We must recognise the financial impact but also the disproportionate way in which the policy intentions and outcomes are delivered.

Why do people want this wonderful agricultural land to be used instead for solar farms? Access to sun is one of the good reasons—the sun is there to grow food, and it is great for power. However, probably the key element at the moment is the guaranteed return that farmers get which is, on average, still about 8%. That is considerable. Many of us would love to have such a guaranteed return.

The other element at the moment is tax relief, which is really important for agricultural land. That tax relief, to be passed on from generation to generation, was intended principally for farming, to make sure that agricultural land was passed on instead of being sold off. Here, because the leases are done in a particular way, we are seeing that such land does not get excluded from the passing on of tax relief. That is an important financial calculation that people make.

[Sir David Davis]

My right hon. Friend makes a brilliantly important point, which I had not thought of before, on this question of tax relief—basically, inheritance tax relief. That has meant that vast quantities of the countryside of Britain are owned by people for a single purpose—to avoid inheritance tax—which actually drives the financialisation of the countryside that has driven this policy.

[Dr Coffey]

I think the policy on tax relief is a sensible one. Just recently, I lobbied to get aspects of nature, such as the edges of fields, to be included in that. Farmers and landowners were suggesting that they could not participate in the environmental land management schemes because they would not get that relief, unlike the solar farms just down the road that covered entire agricultural elements and could still participate. There is a balance to be had. The impact on tenant farmers has also been pointed out. The return, and the pricing of land, is a key element. It is concerning for those of us who represent rural areas in particular, and for those trying to make sure that the sums add up.

There has been quite a lot of discussion about the classification of land. I think it is fair to say that the maps are quite old and do not differentiate between grades 3a and 3b. When I went back into DEFRA 18 months ago, as Secretary of State, I asked what we could do, bearing in mind the fact that we had been tasked with producing a land use framework. I was told it would take several years to redo those maps, which was somewhat disheartening. I will not pretend that I put any more energy into that, at that time, in the preparation for a land use framework.

There was quite a lot of discussion between me and the previous Secretary of State. The analysis indicated that the estimates were that about 1% of the land being used for agriculture would be consumed by potential conversion to solar farms. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister what that proportion is right now, including the land used for connections that have already been granted by National Grid.

National Grid talks about capacity; it says it has tons of solar, compared with what can actually be connected. That leads to the concentrations that my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) mentioned. Even now, National Grid continues to keep offering connections in areas where a substation or a converter station is going to be built, rather than for many of the other applications that would cost too much money and would not be economical to connect to the grid. It is a concern for me that, all of a sudden, we get energy islands, not deserts, right in front of our eyes. The purpose of these areas, as part of the natural countryside, producing food and other elements of benefit to our country, is all of a sudden being turned into these energy islands.

I should say that there is plenty of grade 4 and grade 5 land in my constituency that gets used for food production. I know that DEFRA is keen to improve the productivity of land and that is why there have been a series of grants in that regard. However, I think it is critical that between DEFRA and DESNZ they start to match up, in the Ministers’ considerations of the NSIP plans, what is happening in that regard about the food security element. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister committed to having a food security index, to be produced annually, and I think the use and projected use of land is critical in that element.

In thinking through what is happening in my own constituency, where there have already been solar farms, I am not going to say they are all bad. They are not. The issue is the growing cumulative effect, the acceleration and the almost blank cheque that is being given to many of the developers and is enticing farmers and landowners. I want to single out Friston. My hon. Friend the Minister will know of my ongoing battle with National Grid about aspects of energy infrastructure in my constituency. By the way, none of it includes a single pylon; we are not talking about pylons here, but there has definitely been a pile-in on the people of that village, and National Grid has now offered two further connections to solar farms of just under 250 MW.

Where do we go from here? I am conscious that the national policy statement for renewable energy infra- structure, EN-3, covers a lot about solar. It does not even exclude grade 1 land from consideration, but it is up to the developers to show that they have considered brownfield sites and I think, Minister, we need some strength and confidence that that really is being done. I know that the Planning Inspectorate provides advice to Ministers to make the final decisions, but it has to be a far more transparent process than what people experience today. It feels like a tick-box exercise; it feels like a rubber stamp. That may not be the intention of the Minister or my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, but it is critical that we address that.

The Secretary of State spoke last October about wanting to make it easier to cut, I think, up to £3 billion of costs a year by trying to get more solar on brownfield sites. It would be helpful to understand from the Minister what, since the Secretary of State’s speech and the direction of travel that she, he and the Prime Minister have set, has happened with the applications for not only planning, but connections. Have we seen that change happen, or have we continued to see more and more solar farms being proposed instead of agricultural production?

The Government have done other positive things. My hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham, leading this debate, questioned some of the grants that were being given for barn solar, as I think we christened it at the time. That was deliberately intended to provide grants to help farmers to generate electricity for use on their farms; it is not designed in any way then to be connected anywhere. I think that is a sensible use of taxpayers’ money from the £2.4 billion, on average, that is distributed in England every year. It is absolutely key that we try to help farmers with their resilience, but we should not be doing that on the basis that taxpayers’ money will be used to fuel higher returns from not actually producing food or looking after livestock.

When it comes to thinking through what the next steps could be, I have already asked the Minister a few questions—I appreciate that he may not have all the information to hand today, but I, like others, am seeking a moratorium on connections until there is a steady state of understanding what is happening in this fair and beautiful land. I am not in DEFRA anymore, so I do not know which of the various stages the preparation of the land use framework is in, but a vital issue is the use of energy and that balance versus of course housing and other elements, because we can actually have multi- faceted land, productive in more ways than one.

It is important that we take this opportunity without trying to get away from the target that we have set of getting to 70 GW by 2035, but let us not go at breakneck speed and end up breaking our necks in this regard. It is important that we try to ensure that there are sensible routes forward from National Grid on connections. Right now, I get the impression that it is just approving or dishing out connections to anybody at all, without necessarily thinking through what the impact will be on food security or on our countryside.

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[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Henderson, for your consideration of the time available in what has been a very useful and educational debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on securing this debate. I also congratulate hon. Members on the way they have put their cases. The contributions from the hon. Members for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), for Buckingham (Greg Smith) and for North Wiltshire (James Gray) and the right hon. Members for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) and for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) all added greatly to the tissue of the debate.

Let us get one or two canards out of the way first. This debate was not, to my mind, about a lot of people standing up and being nimbys, although I understand that hon. Members will quite rightly want to defend what they consider to be the best interests of their constituencies. We had an intervention from the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), who said that he would stand by South Holland and The Deepings to the last; the right hon. Member for Gainsborough, who I think perhaps is producing evidence for the wrong side in the civil war, nevertheless made the point very strongly about what he felt he was here to do for the interests of his constituency. That is not about nimbyism, but about defending what one thinks is best for one’s own area of the country.

The problem we have is how we ally together a policy that, by and large, everyone in this Chamber is agreed on and the way we carry it out in practice. The policy, on which I think there is no real difference between the Opposition and the Government, reflects the strong view that we should move rapidly forward on the deployment of solar across the country. The Government have a target of 70 GW of solar to be deployed by 2035. In our plans for decarbonisation of the energy system by 2030, we want to see 50 GW installed by 2030.

That is, in part, because solar is now one of the cheapest forms of energy that can be deployed in an energy emergency, where we have to produce an enormous amount of additional capacity over the next few years, in addition to replacing what is going away, to ensure that our system is resilient, stable and homegrown for our future. The fact that solar has to play a central role in our overall energy economy in the future, and the fact that the targets for installation of solar are very similar between the Opposition and the Government, underline how central it is felt to be that solar should play that key role.

When we decide that it will play that key role, the next question is: how do we do it? That is what a lot of the debate today has landed on. Where do we put solar? How do we put solar in various places? What is the most beneficial way to do it, assuming we are going to do it for the country as whole?

Much as we might want to, we will not be able to deliver all the solar on roofs and brownfield sites—certainly not on roofs. But, as I will come to in a moment, the issue of what proportion we can install in particular areas relates to how the Government set out planning and other energy management arrangements that prevent or downgrade the possibility of putting solar panels on to roofs, buildings, industrial workplaces and so on. The Opposition very much want to see, if possible, the predominance of that solar development concentrated on brownfield sites, roofs and industrial buildings, but we recognise that there is an enormous amount of work to do to facilitate the planning and commissioning arrangements that will allow that to happen.

Hon. Members, particularly the hon. Member for Redditch, mentioned cost and remediation on brownfield sites. Solar treads very lightly on the earth. We can do things with solar on brownfield sites that we might not be able to do with other forms of development on a brownfield site, particularly if it needs some remediation, so that is not the key issue. The key issue is the value of brownfield sites in an urban context and the hope value that those sites have, often in contradistinction to the sort of value that the developers think they might get from land that is not going to change its value, on hope or otherwise, in terms of their developments.

[Sir David Davis]

I am listening with interest to the hon. Gentleman. Does he agree that if we increase the incentive, up to the point of mandating in some cases, for the use of brownfield sites and roofs and so on, that is likely to alter the economics, with people like Elon Musk and others investing in more cost-effective and more easily used photovoltaic cells for that purpose?

[Dr Whitehead]

Yes, indeed. As the right hon. Member will know, solar is now not looking for subsidy from the Government in the way that, as the right hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal mentioned, it was a number of years ago. It might be that we ought to look at how we can direct the best use of land and facilities for solar, by reintroducing incentives and disincentives that can go into solar development for the future. I would emphasise that that is all in the gift of Government to bring about, in terms of changes to how planning, underwriting and frameworks are organised. We mentioned the land use framework, which has still not come forward from DEFRA. All those things can play a much more substantial role in getting the balance right about where we put what is an imperative to develop for the future.

Some of the questions that have been raised are about not so much solar itself, but, among other things, the cumulation of particular sites in particular places. Of course, there is not anything in planning arrangements that can easily deal with the question of cumulation. Again, that needs to be put into the context of a wider land use planning arrangement for the future. I am from a constituency that has one farmer, although we are not allowed to recognise who that farmer is in the census because we are not allowed to record one farmer in the census return; it has to be two farmers or no farmers. However, I do understand that it is a real issue when there is a cumulation of a number of these things in rural constituencies, and they can see no benefit of that cumulation for their local populations.

Again, it may be within the gift of Government to mitigate that problem by enabling local communities to benefit from the output of the particular farms in their area. Notwithstanding that, it is certainly the case that cumulation has come about not just because of developers’ lust for very large schemes, but because at the moment those are some of the only places where they can get decent connections in the near future. For example, Lincolnshire was the site of two power stations—Cottam and West Burton—which have now closed, but it still has good, high-level grid connections.

Therefore, there are schemes that might come forward in other parts of the country that do not have such good connections, which are being put on the backburner just because developers can get particular connections right now. That is also in the gift of the Government to sort out. They should get the connections in the country on a regularised basis so that the people bringing forward their solar developments actually have a choice of where to put their connection based on the best site for their development, rather than just looking at the economics of getting a connection right this minute.

Energy Bill [Lords]

David Davis Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 5th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

A core pillar of this Bill is the delivery of a safe, secure and resilient UK energy system, but no energy system can be safe and secure when it risks undermining our food security and contravenes our values by using forced labour throughout its supply chains. We live in a contested world, and there is no doubt that energy security is one of the greatest challenges of our time, but we can have no security when our energy system is riddled with forced labour from a hostile state. The use of forced labour—specifically, Uyghur forced labour—in supply chains not only contradicts our ethical and moral values, but undermines our fight for human rights across the globe. We cannot go green on Uyghur blood-red labour.

Beyond the morals, there are serious commercial and security risks. British and international manufacturers that do not use slave labour—that abide by our modern slavery laws—are being priced out and undercut by Chinese suppliers that do not care. That contravenes all notions of fair market competition and punishes those who play by the rules, supporting only the communist People’s Republic of China state-backed enterprises. We are unnecessarily undermining our security when we do not tackle this problem.

Turning to the two new clauses that I tabled, I will not move new clause 48, but I will make the point that it is about moving to a rooftop-first strategy. We must make sure that we stop targeting the best and most versatile land. At my last count, 77 solar plants are currently proposed in Lincolnshire and bordering counties, totalling 38,000 acres of good arable land. That is wrong, but as I say, I will not move the new clause.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is entirely right in her argument, but this is not just about the overall number of sites. Individual projects take up over 3,500 acres in my constituency, industrialising a piece of beautiful English countryside and destroying the lives of five villages. In fact, if anything, my hon. Friend’s clause does not go far enough.

[Alicia Kearns]

I thank my right hon. Friend, who as always makes very valid points. In my own constituency, one village will be 95% encircled by solar that will be 13 feet high, in one of the areas that produces the greatest food in our country.