Solar Development: Newark

James Naish Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and I know he has spoken about this before. Let us do exactly that—let us have floating solar panels, if there is the appetite for them. Let us have solar panels on our factories and warehouses, above our multi-storey car parks and on homes, frankly, but let us not destroy the countryside for a generation or more.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

I should note my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a landowner, and I should also acknowledge that the right hon. Gentleman is my Member of Parliament. I will make a helpful contribution in a moment, but I wonder what his views are on landowner choice in this. One of the solar applications he is referencing is from a single landowner who has made the choice to put the land forward for this purpose because he lives a long way away. How does that fit into the arguments he is making as, presumably, a free market economist?

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (Kerry McCarthy)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) on securing a debate on this important issue on behalf of his constituents. As he has acknowledged, I am limited in what I can say about specific projects within the planning system, but before I move on to address some of the detail that he has mentioned in his speech, I will explain why solar is so important to our energy security, to lower bills, and for climate action.

More than three years on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, our energy system remains at the mercy of price fluctuations on the international fossil fuel markets. Wholesale gas prices remain high—75% higher than before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The simple fact is that the only way to get energy bills down for good is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. That is why one of the Government’s guiding missions is to achieve clean power by 2030. Solar, as the cheapest and most easily deployable renewable energy source, is right at the heart of that mission.

Our clean power action plan, published last December, set out that 45 GW to 47 GW of solar power are required by 2030, up from about 19 GW at present. Thankfully, our vastly experienced UK solar sector stands ready to deploy at pace and at scale. One of the first things that we did on getting into government last year was to consent to several major solar projects that had been stuck in the in-tray. Solar is overwhelmingly popular with the British public. Our recent public attitudes survey found that solar energy is supported by 86% of the public—that figure has never dropped below 80%.

I agree with the right hon. Member for Newark, however, that if we want to keep support for solar that high, it must be rolled out in a way that provides communities with a say and with a direct benefit if they host clean power projects. First, that means protecting local communities and ensuring that only the right projects get the green light from the planning system. All projects are subject to a rigorous planning process in which the views and interests of local communities are considered. That includes things such as the potential impact on biodiversity, the local economy, visual amenity, protected landscapes and land use.

Secondly, it is essential that communities feel involved in the decision making on projects. Developers of projects larger than 50 MW, which qualify as nationally significant infrastructure, must complete considerable community engagement before any decision is taken. I remind the right hon. Gentleman that we are about to return control over a greater number of those projects to local authorities by doubling the threshold to 100 MW. That will come into force at the end of this year. For projects of all sizes, however, the level and quality of community engagement by developers is taken into account by decision makers.

The right hon. Member for Newark expressed concern about the use of agricultural land. The planning guidance makes it clear that, whenever possible, developers should utilise brownfield, industrial, contaminated or previously developed land. Where the development of agricultural land is shown to be necessary, lower-quality land should be preferred to higher-quality land, but it is important that we do not overstate the amount of land that is used for solar developments. In the solar road map, which was published in June, we set out our expectation that, even in the most ambitious scenarios, only up to 0.4% of UK land would be devoted to solar—significantly less, as Members may be aware, than is currently covered by golf courses. I will come on to the issue of clustering and concentration in a moment.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned food security. We do not accept that there is a trade-off between solar deployment and food security. In fact, the chief climate adviser to the National Farmers Union stated recently that there is no threat to national food security from solar.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned biodiversity. There is evidence that solar can improve biodiversity when it is installed on agricultural land—he talked about sheep and mentioned sheep grazing under solar panels. Under biodiversity net gain, projects smaller than 50 MW are required to increase biodiversity by 10%, and we are investigating the possibility of extended BNG to nationally significant projects as well. I do not know if he has read the recent study by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the University of Cambridge that found that solar farms in East Anglia have up to three times more birds than surrounding arable farmland.

When local communities do their country a great service, as the right hon. Gentleman said, by hosting solar farms, it is important that they enjoy a share of the benefits. In a recent working paper, we proposed that it should be mandatory for developers to provide community benefit funds. The working paper included a call for evidence seeking views on facilitating shared ownership and on whether the Government should consider expanding shared ownership, and we are currently working to get that framework right.

[James Naish]

Having worked in the energy industry, I am a strong proponent of local area energy plans that would empower communities to plan their energy needs. One of the big issues for constituents is that energy planning feels very reactive and is based on what landowners choose to do. It would be far more empowering to encourage communities to look at the land within their local authority or a bigger area and to proactively plan, just as we do with housing. Will the Minister consider thinking about how she can work with other Departments to encourage local area energy plans to have a statutory basis?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am pretty sure that my hon. Friend has raised that issue at Energy Security and Net Zero questions before. I will remind the Minister for Energy, my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen (Michael Shanks), to engage further with him about that.

On clustering, and coming to the nub of the right hon. Gentleman’s speech, some communities feel that what they are being asked to host is excessive. I have a few responses to that issue. First, the planning system includes provisions to assess cumulative impacts under such circumstances, so that should be a part of the process. Secondly, we will be changing the way that we allocate energy infrastructure around the country. To date, developers have been incentivised to build projects where there is spare grid capacity and in industrial areas, such as the midlands. That is why there is that attraction and that can lead to clustering.

In the future, we will take a completely different approach to the one that we inherited from the right hon. Gentleman’s Government. We have commissioned the National Energy System Operator to create a strategic spatial energy plan that will set out a strategy for how new infrastructure should be spread across the country. By investing in our electricity networks and our grid, we can ensure that the grid will go where the projects are, rather than the other way around.

I wish I had time to answer all the other points that the right hon. Gentleman raised about storage and safety, but I will be happy to do so in writing. Finally, I want to focus on what we are doing to accelerate solar deployment on rooftops. We will encourage the installation of solar on new-build housing and on commercial buildings through new building standards. The vast majority of new homes built under these standards will have rooftop solar fitted. We have permitted development rights to allow most rooftop projects to proceed without an application for planning permission, and we have just conducted a call for evidence about adding solar canopies in car parks.

Great British Energy is putting solar on 200 schools and on 200 NHS sites to bring down bills and build more local clean power. Next month, we will launch our ambitious warm homes plan, with £13.2 billion available to support people with the upfront costs of installing green technology, including rooftop solar, insulation of homes, heat pumps and so on. We are unleashing a rooftop revolution because we think that rooftop is so important, but the scale of the challenge facing us, to get to clean power by 2030 and to ramp up renewables, means that ground-mounted solar and floating solar, which the Government also support, have to be a part of the plan.

To sum up, we take the concerns raised by the right hon. Gentleman very seriously. We want to take people with us on our clean power mission, which will work only if we do so. We are putting measures in place to get the planning process right, to ensure that communities benefit from hosting clean energy, and to support the strategic spread of projects across the country, including in urban areas, through our rooftop revolution. I am glad that the British people agree with us that solar is a vital part of our future energy mix, but we are never complacent about retaining that support. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to set out—in brief, at least—our position, and he will appreciate why we cannot be too specific about some of the points he raises.

Question put and agreed to.