Significant Energy Infrastructure Projects: Suffolk Coast

Jenny Riddell-Carpenter Excerpts

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

I will call Jenny Riddell-Carpenter to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. Other Members should be aware that they can contribute only with the prior permission of the Member in charge of the debate and the Minister. Sadly, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up the debate, because we have only half an hour.

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter (Suffolk Coastal) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the coordination of Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects for energy on the Suffolk coast.

Suffolk Coastal is central to the UK’s energy ambitions. It is often said that up to 30% of Britain’s future energy is expected to be generated in, or transmitted through, my constituency. Suffolk Coastal is home to nationally and internationally important landscapes, including national landscapes, sites of special scientific interest, the Suffolk heritage coast and wetlands that form part of the east Atlantic flyway migratory bird route. Those are not simply scenic features; they underpin local economies and nature-based tourism, and they are vital to national commitments to biodiversity and environmental protection.

As the Minister will be aware, the nationally significant infrastructure projects that I will refer to are being delivered within a small, 10-mile radius, and sit in the heart of those national landscapes, including in nature reserves run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and on important national sites. They stretch from LionLink in Walberswick, which is just south of Southwold, down to Sea Link in Aldeburgh, then next door to Sizewell C, which is Europe’s largest energy project, and link into proposed converter stations in Friston and Saxmundham. Some of those projects have consent while others are going through the process as we speak.

What is remarkable—it is the point of the debate—is the lack of co-ordination between the plans. No attempt has been made to plan for the cumulative impact of the projects or to consider how better to co-ordinate them. In fact, in March 2024, National Grid published details showing that it has no intention to co-ordinate LionLink, led by National Grid Ventures, with the more advanced Sea Link project, led by National Grid Electricity Transmission.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for introducing the debate. She is right to highlight the issues of coastal communities, where there are very many difficulties. My constituency suffers from coastal erosion, for example, which has been worked on, but there is also the potential to produce clean renewable energy. Does she agree that there is, perhaps, an opportunity for the Minister and the Government to put their minds and money into harnessing that energy for the benefit of all communities throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I thank the hon. Member for his contribution, and I look forward to the Minister’s remarks.

As I said, the multiple NSIPs in Suffolk Coastal are within just a 10-mile radius. They are being planned in an area of the country that is mostly served by B roads and country lanes. It seems remarkable that developers are being allowed to bring forward these proposals on some of England’s most important nature sites, when offshore alternatives could easily have been considered. I will focus in this debate on how Suffolk Coastal is being let down and why I am asking the Government to work with me to require the developers to look again at their plans and improve their proposals to minimise disruption to both people and the environment.

As the Minister will know, the previous Government totally vacated the leadership space when it came to our country’s energy and biodiversity planning, and the void was filled by energy developers. They decided to take the lead and were left to make proposals for totally unsuitable landscapes, all because it was cheaper than developing brownfield sites. What we have been left with is a series of unco-ordinated whack-a-mole projects on the Suffolk coast. We have an opportunity under the new Government to provide greater planning and leadership on these critical infrastructure challenges.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

Having worked in the energy industry, I continue to be a strong proponent of local area energy plans, because they would empower communities to make decisions about their own energy needs and how much energy they want to export. At the moment the process feels very reactive and is based on private and landowner interests, as opposed to empowering communities across a local authority area to make decisions. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be helpful to have energy planning on a statutory footing across every local authority in the country?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I know that my hon. Friend has been passionate about this since his arrival in this place last year. I look forward to the Minister’s response to that point, but yes, I do agree; in fact, I will come on to some of those themes later.

There is an opportunity to set up an overarching body to ensure that the many competing schemes, whether already consented, within the development consent order process or in the pipeline, are properly co-ordinated. The body could be departmental or independent from the Government, but it would operate under the direction of the Secretary of State. Although the then Department for Business, Innovation and Skills consulted on the concept of a future systems operator for electricity, that does not go far enough or quickly enough. There needs to be oversight of the cumulative impact of all NSIP schemes in an area. The failings that arise in the absence of such oversight are evident in many areas of my constituency, but are perhaps best highlighted by the case of Boden Farms.

Boden Farms was subject to compulsory purchase of land to accommodate Sizewell C’s development phase, and work has begun on a new relief road on the farm’s former land. The farmer has been told by National Grid Ventures that it, too, will need to access his land in order to lay cables for LionLink. It cannot tell him where, when or if it will be made subject to a compulsory purchase order, but it can tell him that in a year or maybe two it will be digging up the very same land that is being worked on right now by Sizewell C, including, most likely, parts of the new relief road that is being built as we speak.

I am very concerned by reports that the only plans LionLink has ever received for the link road are the ones the landowner provided himself. Surely, that cannot be right, but it is not a one-off; this story is repeated across my constituency, in every parish where lines are being laid or work is being planned. That is in no one’s interest—not the community’s, not nature’s and not even the developer’s—so I tabled an amendment to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill that would have made it a legal requirement for energy developers to co-ordinate their work.

Farmers from Woodbridge to Leiston, and parishes from Friston to Walberswick and Yoxford to Peasenhall, all ask the same thing: why are these projects popping up with no co-ordination, and why is there no legal requirement for them to work together? It is our communities and our environment that have to endure the cumulative impact of all this.

Developers are also failing to put proper mitigations in place or to listen to the concerns of local residents, which is having a real impact. Farmers have told me of issues engaging with energy developers when they have raised objections to cables being buried to a depth of less than 1.8 metres on their land, in breach of electrical safety guidance, leaving them unable to use the land for arable farming. Energy developers have been unwilling to engage, which means that land risks being taken out of arable food production permanently. In laying any cables on active agricultural land, developers should guarantee that arable farmland will be safeguarded for future farming use, and I tabled another amendment to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill that would have made it a legal requirement for energy developers to lay cables to a minimum depth of 1.8 metres.

The depth of cables is an issue not just for farmers, but for offshore shipping. Members will appreciate that I have shipping lanes off the coast of my constituency, and the Harwich Haven Authority has told me that it is concerned that energy developers must do more to engage with it to ensure that cables are buried at a sufficient depth that projects do not compromise navigational safety. The Sunk area around Harwich Haven is a vital and highly complex shipping zone. Any offshore developments must be planned with strict adherence to safety requirements.

The UK has let developers lead the conversation and the strategy. We have ended up with a mismatch of proposals, in the wrong place, with no co-ordination and no desire to think of better alternatives. Other countries are stealing a march. Holistic network design criteria are adopted and adhered to in North sea countries including Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. As a result, they choose brownfield sites at the outset for their energy infrastructure hubs and, in doing so, manage to avoid adverse impacts on communities and ecologies.

Places such as Zeebrugge and Rotterdam industrial zones are chosen for building substations, with space to build future projects, including hydrogen storage. Those projects are co-ordinated in order to minimise needless damage, maximise efficiencies and move at pace. For the same reasons, energy developers in the UK should be required to pursue as a first option brownfield hubs where multiple projects can co-exist without any adverse impact on nature.

We need to create a legal duty for developers working in the same area to exchange information, seek opportunities for shared infrastructure, reduce cumulative impact and align timelines. A framework of co-ordination, co-design, community benefit and compensation would mean that communities, town and parish councils and the Government could see the whole picture, not just the smallest of fragments. So many of my constituents are devastated by the cumulative impact that these energy projects within a 10-mile radius are having on nature, and no one organisation has ever looked at it.

We can get this right. If we do, we can deliver on our climate ambitions and protect nature at the same time, but it will require greater leadership, oversight and scrutiny, and greater emphasis on making sure that we co-ordinate, plan and implement a clean, green energy revolution that is strategic and not just whack-a-mole. It must be rooted in knowing the land and the geography, and not in the whims of the developer. Getting this right now will mean better protections for our natural environment, better safeguards for our local communities and a lasting legacy for the next generation.

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

I call the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State—no, I am underselling him. I call the Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Shanks]

My hon. Friend foresees what I was going to say. I was just about to come on to his earlier intervention, which was really important. He is right about the need for infrastructure plans to be generated by communities and bottom-up. We need to take a national view of the future of the energy system as well, but I think both can work together.

The third great part of this planning is the regional energy plans. We also see a place, on a very localised level, for the local energy plans that many local authorities and combined mayoral authorities are working on, but the regional plans break up the whole of Great Britain into smaller areas so that we can look in detail at what energy can be sited in different areas, and crucially, at how the two kinds of plan can work together—the Government’s land use framework for the future use of land in the country alongside the capability and interest from communities to host infrastructure as well. I hope that we are doing that, but my hon. Friend should continue to bring that challenge to the Government, because it is something that we are committed to doing. I am confident that he will do so, which is great.

Let me finish on a point around the impact on communities. We do not want to get to a place where the future energy system is something that is done to communities, and we recognise that the failure of strategic planning across the country has meant that that is all too often what it has felt like for communities. We have a role to play in ensuring that, where communities do host important energy infrastructure, they benefit from it. Hosting such infrastructure benefits the whole country—without a resilient energy system, we all lose out, and we will not deliver the economic growth that we need—but the communities that host this infrastructure should feel a benefit from doing so.

That is why, in March, we announced two community benefit initiatives, guidance on community funds for communities that host this key infrastructure, and a bill discount scheme for households that are sited in proximity to new transmission infrastructure. The guidance sets out our expectations for how communities hosting that infrastructure should benefit. We will have more to say as the bill discount scheme is developed through secondary legislation, but that is an important statement: people should directly benefit, through money off their bills, if they are doing the country a favour by hosting that infrastructure. In May we also published a working paper on wider questions around community benefits, to make sure that other types of energy infrastructure also benefit communities.

In conclusion, I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal for securing the debate. I know that we will continue to have these conversations. In this job I sometimes wish, for a number of reasons, that we could turn back the clock and do things slightly differently. I have been told repeatedly that, unfortunately, that is not an option, although I continue to push for it. Strategic planning is one of those regrets. As a country, whatever the political view, we will look back and wish that we had planned our energy system more holistically across the country. We are doing that. That does not change some of the decisions that have been made and some of the decisions that are in the system now, but it will allow us to build a more holistic system in the future.

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

Will the Minister meet me to talk about what more co-ordination can happen now through the projects that are live, in the way that I set out in my speech?

[Michael Shanks]

I am always happy to meet any hon. Member from either side of the House, and I do regularly, but I will certainly meet my hon. Friend to discuss that. For obvious reasons, it is difficult to comment on specific applications in the system, but I am happy to meet her.

Let me finish with a general point that brings us back to our national mission. As a country, we must move quickly to replace a 19th-century fossil fuel-based energy system with a system that is fit for the 21st century. Even if we were not on that mission, the huge increase in demand for electricity necessitates the building of more energy infrastructure across the country. We must make the change that we are making to bring down bills and benefit consumers, to benefit our national energy security in an increasingly uncertain world, and to tackle climate change. Anyone who says that we can get by with not building any infrastructure is quite wrong.

Since time began, there has been opposition to any pieces of infrastructure built in any part of the country, but we must as a country recognise that, for us to deliver on the outcomes we want as a Government and improve people’s lives, we have to build infrastructure across the country. We want to do that in partnership with communities, to ensure that we do so in as well planned and strategic a way as possible, and to ensure that communities that host such infrastructure genuinely benefit from it. There is much more work to do, and I look forward to engaging with hon. Members on these difficult questions so that we can find the right solution for the country and local communities. I thank my hon. Friend once again for securing the debate.

Question put and agreed to.