Renewable Energy Projects: Community Benefits

John Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Westminster Hall

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald) on securing this a vital debate.

“Wha but lo’e the bonnie hills”,

the very first line of the song “Bonnie Galloway”—I will spare you by not singing it, Dr Huq—extols the virtues of the rolling uplands of the south-west of Scotland. Yet the tranquillity of the moors, farms and forests has been disturbed these last few years by the relentless march of wind turbines. Now Dumfries and Galloway is festooned with them and we have many more on the way. We are in the foothills of a renewables revolution.

Arguments for or against wind farms are not for today. I feel that battle has been lost, but we must fight a rearguard action against ever-bigger turbines. Giants of over 650 feet from base to rotor tip are the fashion, and they are moving ever closer to our towns and villages. I feel that we will see Governments happily trample local opposition to wind farms and turn a deaf ear to forcing power cables underground.

Whether we welcome wind farms or have them foisted upon us, we must wrest from them what community benefit we can. Communities already see little enough of the supply chain benefits. It is to be hoped that the previous UK Government’s efforts to create freeports in Scotland might see more of the manufacturing based here in Britain. I have hopes, too, that Labour will make good on a Northern Ireland enhanced investment zone, as mapped out by the previous Conservative Government, that included the western end of my constituency. That would be a game changer: imagine the jobs created if we could build those giant turbines in Stranraer and ship them out via the deep-water port of Cairnryan.

On renewables, we in rural Scotland have had much of the pain and little of the gain.

[Torcuil Crichton]

Will the hon. Gentleman agree that the difference between Dumfries and Galloway and many parts of the highlands and islands that have benefited from community or commercially-owned wind farms is community ownership of land and that, were that pattern to be repeated in his part of the world, communities would benefit not only from community land ownership, but from owning the turbines that spin?

[John Cooper]

I resist the invitation to back a land grab, but the hon. Gentleman makes a valid point.

We have a chance now to bake in greater benefits for our communities, and they should be seen, not as bribery to buy off opposition, but as the power giants entering partnership with communities. I still say that our communities need a far greater say over wind farm consents, but the urban-obsessed SNP in Edinburgh and Labour here in this place will not shift.

There is an undeniable whirlwind of change on wind power. We have the chance to reap a positive harvest from that whirlwind for the people living in the shadow of giant turbines and pylons. Let us seize that chance.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

I am going to keep the time limit at two and a half minutes. If everyone is kind to each other, everyone will get in. A brilliant example will be Polly Billington.