Nationally Significant Energy Infrastructure Projects

Helen Whately Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I agree with a lot of what the hon. Gentleman says. The projects that we are discussing should deliver that as part of their long-term investment, and many of those things do not need to sit within the community investment programme itself.

The guidance also included an obligation for the transmission owners, National Grid and ScottishPower Renewables, to run grant programmes, ranging from £10,000 grassroots grants up to £500,000 strategic grants. Importantly, the guidance rests on five key principles, including lasting legacy and transparent outcomes. If the developers depart from the guidance, they must explain why. It is a serious framework and the Government deserve credit for it. But the rates are recommended rates, not diktats. They should be the minimum, not the maximum. In Suffolk Coastal, we are seeing the minimum rather than the maximum far too often.

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. She is making an important point about the fact that we need not just the minimum but the maximum. We need really strong commitments. The Cleve Hill solar development in the village of Graveney in my constituency is huge. It has obliterated 900 acres of agricultural land and marshland. While it has been in construction, there has been enormous disruption to the local village and schools, and damage to the roads and to people’s properties. I want my constituents to get proper compensation and ongoing economic benefit—not just lip service in the form of a playground or cycle path, but something that recognises the massive impact of the development on their lives.

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I could not agree more. We need to make sure that we compensate for the impact, especially when projects are built out. I will come to that later in my speech.

The National Grid’s Sea Link energy transmission project, a 138-kilometre interconnector between Pegwell bay in Kent and Suffolk Coastal, has a proposed community fund of £2.1 million, split between Kent and Suffolk. Let me break that down: that is roughly 0.1% of Sea Link’s total project budget. For a project that cuts through some of the most important nature sites in our country, in a county proud of nature-based tourism, 0.1% is not an investment strategy; it is a rounding error. It might meet the letter of the guidance, but it falls far short on delivering for our communities. The guidance is explicit that funds should deliver lasting benefits. I want a community-owned energy fund that is locally owned, locally governed and delivers permanent accountable benefit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Shanks]

Let me come to both of those points. First, we are potentially confusing two different things. Community benefits for transmission infrastructure are mandatory; we have separately consulted on whether community benefits for wider energy projects should be mandatory, and we will respond to that consultation soon, because I recognise many of the points that have been made. What we do not want to do, though, is create one-size-fits-all solutions in Whitehall that will work differently in different communities. As a Minister, I do not want to sit here and say: “This is how your community benefit will work in your community.” Instead, I want to empower communities to figure out how that works best in their local area. I have seen models of that in all the visits that I have made across the country.

The minimum standards should be there to make sure that the process is transparent, with communities and not developers in the driving seat, and that there is long-term certainty. I do not think that we should say that play parks and cycle paths are bad things to invest in, but there should be some long-term investments alongside them. I have seen some good examples, just in the past few weeks, of that being done well. We need to separate out those two things.

I have wrestled with the cost point as well. In principle, I would like to see communities having even more community benefits, but we have to recognise that the cost of them will be borne by bill payers right across the country. The balance that we are trying to strike, as a Government determined to tackle the cost of living, is to have communities benefiting as much as they possibly can but without putting up bills significantly for all bill payers across the country, which would be a disproportionate impact at a time when the affordability crisis is our No. 1 priority.

[Helen Whately]

On the point about considering the community benefit, what counts as a community is really important. In some circumstances—this has come up in my local area—a large geographical area is considered as a community, even though the number of households that are very substantially affected is very small. It is what they want that should really matter. Yes, of course I care about what the wider community wants, but we need to think about the small number of households in which there has been a real impact on people’s day-to-day lives.

[Michael Shanks]

I totally accept the hon. Member’s point, although the point has been rightly raised that the impact of building these projects is often felt by a much wider community, which is why the community benefits are wider. I should also say that we have to separate questions of compensation from questions of community benefit. Compensation is paid, as part of a process, to those who have been significantly disrupted or whose land has been changed in whatever way: that is a contractual negotiation between a landowner or resident and a developer, and it is not for the Government to intervene in it. Community benefits are about a much wider view of how these projects benefit the wider community.

I take the point about the design of the community, which is really important. With something like the Sea Link offshore cable, it is sometimes hard to look at what the community around it would look like. We have wrestled with how to define it: there is a danger that if we have too broad a definition, the community benefit funds will not get to the people who would benefit most. There is probably more that we can do on that, and I am very open-minded about contributions from hon. Members on that point.

On the level of benefit—I know that these points have been raised before—the electricity bill discount will give the people living closest to the infrastructure money off their bills. We are seeking to remind people that the more of this infrastructure we build, the fewer constraints we have on the grid and the more we can get cheap, clean power into homes and businesses and bring down bills for everyone. There is an impact beyond the projects themselves.