Large-scale Solar Farms

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I congratulate my constituency neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on her comprehensive introduction to the debate. These proposals for huge solar “farms”—they are not farms at all, of course; that is a misnomer—are unwise and unwelcome and will undermine our countryside. The opposition to them in my constituency, and increasingly up and down the country, is as widespread as it is deeply felt. I know that many friends and colleagues will have had the same experience. As we have said again and again, we are not opposed to solar energy; offshore wind and rooftop solar are entirely welcome.

As I travel up and down between Westminster and West Lindsey, I see the motorways and the A1 lined with giant logistics and distribution centres with flat rooftops that are perfect for solar panels. As my hon. Friend said, there are perhaps 600,000 acres of south-facing roofs that we could put solar panels on. Of course, there are also manufacturing and brownfield sites.

Taking a vast amount of good land out of agricultural production is incredibly short-sighted. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) argued in a debate on this subject two years ago, we should not build a single solar panel on good farmland until we have solar panels on every large building.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham has made clear, Lincolnshire is the breadbasket of England: we produce 12% of the food we eat. In Lincolnshire, we want to safeguard that living tradition. As we all know, the planning framework has a presumption against building panels on land graded 1, 2 or 3a. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings and I met the Prime Minister yesterday and asked him to extend that protection to 3b. At Energy questions this week, I made the same point and got a reassurance on the Floor of the House that it was never the intention of the Government to build on good agricultural land.

I know that the Minister is very limited in what he can say, but as my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) said, in the remaining months available to him as a Minister in this Government, we just have to act to end this scandal of solar panels being put on 3b land. It is simply not acceptable.

Food distribution networks worldwide still face disruption thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As Matt Ridley pointed out in The Daily Telegraph this month, the UK is currently vying with the intensive agriculture of New Zealand in terms of wheat yield. Britain’s combination of moist soil and long summer days is perfect for growing wheat, as we well know in Lincolnshire. How will that be affected if we shift from useful and nourishing food to unreliable energy production? People say that solar energy is green, but what is more green than converting sunlight into food? That is what our farms do. How will that be affected if we shift from useful and nourishing food to unreliable energy production? The quantity of land involved is staggering. The journalist Robert Bryce has discovered that solar panels typically need about 200 times the amount of land as gas to generate the equivalent energy output.

Britain is and always will be a maritime power, a trading nation and an agricultural producer. We cannot produce everything we consume, but the more we do, the better off we are and the greater our food security is. Do we really think that turfing out tenant farmers and their families—good, solid people who may have been there for 200 years—to build solar panels on thousands and thousands of acres of arable land at the behest of entrepreneurs from London is a good idea? Those farmers have no rights, by the way. What is so unfair about that is that the rewards to some very large landowners are absolutely staggering: £100,000 on 100 acres. Is it any surprise that all those people are being bought off?

People say that solar farms are not subsidised, but of course they are subsidised through green levies. Somebody on the living wage in a terraced house in Gainsborough pays through their energy bills, and it goes into the pockets of entrepreneurs and huge landowners earning £100,000 a year on just 100 acres. That is not green, not fair and not right.

Meanwhile, our typically wet British weather means that we have occasionally had to fire up the coal plants to meet the country’s energy needs, not just when it is rainy and cloudy, but sometimes even when the sun is shining. We all know that solar panels do not work when it is dark, but people assume they work fantastically well in the summer—not necessarily. Last summer, we had a sweltering week that led to an uptick in energy demand as people turned on their air conditioning and plugged in their fans. Solar panels tend to be optimised for 25°C. In a summer heatwave with temperatures of 30°C or more, the amount of energy that solar panels contribute decreases—how bizarre. Everybody assumes that these things are wonderful when the sun is shining, but that is not necessarily true on the hottest days when we need them most. Solar is useful, but it simply cannot be relied on. Keeping a massive gas-powered infrastructure on hand is a necessary component of this solar-powered system.

Solar on its own is hugely expensive. A point that has not been made yet is that ecologists have become more aware of the importance of embodied energy: the usage that goes into the building or manufacture of something. One of the green arguments against tearing down Richmond House while the Palace of Westminster is renovated is that we would be demolishing not just a listed building, but one that is perfectly useable. It is just decades old and has decades left of its natural cycle, so that is not a green thing to do. There is no clear evidence that the embodied energy involved in constructing these massive solar panel projects will ever be made back during their 15-year lifecycle, before they are replaced or removed. When embodied energy is taken into account, it is doubtful that these huge proposals are in fact sustainable or green.

Massive solar panel installations have the potential to send property values plunging. As my hon. Friends have argued, homeowners have put their life savings into their homes and should have the right to defend them. They are accused of being nimbys, but they are simply good people defending often quite modest lifestyles in our rural economy.

The beautiful landscapes of England—not to mention the holiday let industry, which has grown immensely across the country and is currently surviving—are under threat. The net effect on tourism in Lincolnshire and across England will be negative. We should foster and encourage that sector across the counties of England, not stifle it.

The inspiration behind solar panel installations is not environmental altruism but naked profit. There is nothing wrong with people wanting to be entrepreneurs or to make profit, but that should not be at the expense of the British countryside. We need greater prosperity spread around the United Kingdom, but these proposals are backed by faceless global investment firms relying on us to sign them a blank cheque. It is not the Government’s job to do that. We must be the custodians of this land, its people and its history, which includes our countryside, farming sector, environment and landscapes. Land-intensive low-output solar installations are not the solution. In fact, they only create more problems.

Solar undoubtedly has a part to play in energy production; we need a diverse energy set-up in this country. The Government also need to build more power plants and replace ones that are coming offline. We need more nuclear; we have been dragging our heels while France has been a marvel on that front. When the oil crisis hit Europe in 1973, the Prime Minister of France, Pierre Messmer, was determined that a great nation like France must be able to look after its energy needs. At the time, most of France’s electricity was generated thanks to foreign oil. Messmer rolled out a massive programme of building nuclear power stations to provide cheap, clean energy. France is now much more globally competitive for business because of nuclear power. The regulated unit price of electricity in France last year was 53% of that of the UK. Messmer said,

“In France, we do not have oil, but we do have ideas.”

Let us have some good ideas, Minister, and not just build over our countryside. Here in the UK, we have North sea oil and gas, so let us have ideas that use cheap, reliable energy from nuclear and gas. Solar and wind can top that up, but they cannot replace it.

It is astonishing how scant the large-scale proposals are in terms of local community gain; they offer virtually nothing—almost no benefit—to my constituents. The arrogance is extraordinary. I suspect that that is because the solar firms are skipping the normal planning process, as has been said many times already, by applying for them as nationally significant infrastructure projects, instead of them being determined locally by our district councils. They have also divided the applications into many smaller ones, even though each one is useless unless it is part of a major offering.

I have argued before the Planning Inspectorate that the collective impact of these proposals is colossal. Each individual application can be evaluated accurately only as a part of a whole. I have attended the public inquiries for West Burton and Cottam, and I have argued my case. In the vicinity of the small town of Gainsborough, within a radius of just six miles, the proposal is for solar farms to cover 10,000 acres of agricultural land. The local authority and local people have absolutely no say. That is entirely wrong and when I have gone in person to argue on behalf of my constituents, the highly paid barristers and solicitors hired by these entrepreneurs from London say, “Well, we’re sorry. We’re only doing what the Government want.” It is now for the Minister, in the time available, to step in and save our people.

This energy will go straight into the national grid. It will have no local benefit and will not reduce energy costs for local people. These proposals are taking up too much land for their energy output, and they are taking out thousands and thousands of acres of land that is good for agriculture, which undermines farming and food security. They will erect eyesores that will lessen the beauty of our natural landscapes and undermine local tourism. They are cheating the system by skipping the normal planning scrutiny provided by democratically accountable local decision-makers. The primary benefit will be to faceless international companies rather than to locals. These vulture firms are attempting to gobble up our countryside. The Government must say no.

I emphasise that, as has been said, we do not need legislation. It is very simple: the Minister must say, “You cannot build these things on grade 3b land.” Any farmer in Lincolnshire would say that there is absolutely no difference between 3a and 3b in terms of production, but we want that to be independently verified. As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) said, we do not want dodgy agronomists going around pretending that this land is grade 3a. There is virtually no difference, so we should not build solar panels on 3b land and it should be independently verified. We want to have planning guidance available to the inspector to ensure that, although we can cope with some solar panel development, it cannot be on the scale of 10,000 acres within six miles. Those are the simple steps that the Minister urgently needs to take.

I end by mentioning that in the civil war, on the margins of my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), who is no longer in his place, there was the battle of Riby Gap, where the pesky parliamentarians tried to displace the noble royalists from that part of Lincolnshire. The royalists fought and they won, and in Lincolnshire, we will fight and we will win.