Large-scale Solar Farms

John Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has done a great service to the House by bringing this debate to our attention. As she will know, my constituency contains a disproportionate amount of that very fine agricultural land, even by Lincolnshire standards. To compromise food security in the interest of energy security is a nonsense. We will make our country more dependent on imports, damaging the environment and robbing our people of the chance of buying and consuming domestically made food.

[Dr Johnson]

As is usually the case, I completely agree with my right hon. Friend and parliamentary neighbour. He will be aware that 12 nationally significant infrastructure project applications are currently in progress in Lincolnshire for large solar projects. That includes Beacon Fen, Springwell, Heckington Fen and Fosse Green Energy, all of which are in my constituency. Those solar schemes alone would cover 9,109 hectares of farmland; such an area would otherwise produce 81,000 tonnes of wheat, which would make 57 million loaves of bread or 1.5 billion Weetabix.

Despite the Government’s guidance that solar prospectors should avoid using the best and most versatile land, many of the proposals would cover enormous swathes of it. Fosse Green will use 2,479 acres of prime farmland, thereby reducing the UK’s valuable food production capacity and exacerbating food insecurity. The best and most versatile land makes up 30% of the Springwell solar farm and 49% of the Heckington Fen application.

Lincolnshire undoubtedly has—I am sure that hon. Friends will agree—the best farmland in the country, but it is not the only place affected by the menace of these massive, farmland-consuming solar applications. My hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns), who is unable to attend today, has been campaigning assiduously against Mallard Pass solar plant in her constituency. That project is to be located on 2,105 acres of agricultural land, 70% of which is grade 1 —our very best farmland. That is the equivalent of 1,300 football pitches and will be 10 times larger than the current-largest solar farm built in the United Kingdom.

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[Dr Johnson]

Surprise, surprise indeed. There is a clear incentive for a developer to report a lower grade of land in this context. The Minister has said to me that he would take steps to review that; will he update the House on what progress has been made?

[Sir John Hayes]

I am delighted to get a second bite of the cherry, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving me that. There are three deceptions. The first, which she described, is of dodgy surveyors and agronomists reclassifying land so that it can be developed. The second is that these large developments include land of different grades. Even if part of the land is grade 1 or 2, because some is not, the developer prosecutes their case accordingly. The third, of course, is that by having these large developments, local authorities and local people are taken out of the frame altogether. Those are deliberate deceptions, and it is up to the Minister, who I know is a fine man with a strong sense of diligence in this regard, to take action to end them.

[Dr Johnson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. He summarises large parts of my speech succinctly.

Another issue that I want to raise is that although large-scale solar may technically be classified as clean energy, many tell me that the companies that supply it are neither morally clean nor environmentally green. My hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton had an Adjournment debate earlier this week in which she made an interesting but rather disturbing speech relating to the use of forced labour in supply chains of solar panels. Her debate highlighted the fact that many solar panels also use vast quantities of coal in their supply chain.

Fosse Green—one of the organisations trying to muscle in on rural Lincolnshire—appears as a British company, but its structure is rather complex. It is actually a joint venture involving two established solar developers: Windel Energy and Recurrent Energy. The latter is, according to the firm itself, the

“wholly-owned subsidiary of Canadian Solar incorporated”.

As highlighted by my hon. Friend, Canadian Solar gets its panels almost exclusively from China, where about 60% of the grid is accounted for by coal-powered energy plants. The plants will have a significant carbon footprint of their own, and once the panels are produced they will have to be transported to and within the UK on ships and lorries powered by hydrocarbons.

The other allegations made against Canadian Solar, which I understand the Minister will be investigating, are particularly worrying. What are the Government doing to investigate the actual benefit of solar projects, taking into account the panels’ production, transportation, regular cleaning and ultimate disposal, and to ensure that we are not complicit in the use of forced labour?

It is self-evident that the companies have little time for the views of those who will be most affected by them. I recently conducted a survey in my constituency in the areas most affected by large-scale NSIP applications. Letters were sent directly to thousands of households in Sleaford and North Hykeham, and I received over 2,000 handwritten responses. These were not simple online forms that could be clicked and submitted multiple times; they were thought-out responses, many of which contained pages—and I mean pages—of heartfelt comments. Of the respondents, 90% were concerned about the enormous scale of the proposals, 68% were extremely concerned about the use of productive farmland, and 55% were extremely concerned about the visual impact.

The accusation often levelled against people who are against the proposals but have to live next to the projects is that this is merely nimbyism: “We like solar panels, but just not next to us.” Actually, although visual impact was a considerable factor in the responses, the far greater concern was about the loss of productive farmland. A significant proportion of my constituents are veterans, serving military personnel and those who work in agriculture, and they more than anyone else understand the extreme importance of food security. The most common response was that we must protect our prime agricultural land in the interests of food security.

That said, I also have sympathy with the aesthetic arguments. Lincolnshire is a particularly beautiful county, and the countryside has inspired much of our nation’s best art and literature. Lincolnshire’s pre-eminent literary figure, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, felt his deepest sympathies for an unaltered rural England, and found himself a stranger in the rapidly changing industrial and mercantile world of 19th-century England. His work remains remarkably relevant to our situation today. His much-loved poem “The Brook”, a memorable personification of a stream, ends with the following lines:

“For men may come and men may go,

But I go on for ever.”

What do we allow to go on forever? Do we allow the industrialisation of our countryside, or do we honour the landscape that has inspired so much of our great literature? Edmund Burke noticed that happiness is the promise of beauty, and it is clear that rural communities will be far unhappier after being deprived of the natural beauty of their surroundings.

Solar prospectors often hide behind claims that their panels will be hidden from public view, but that is often not the case. The panels are often more than 4 metres tall—twice the height of the tallest gentleman here—and especially visible from higher areas. Even in a relatively flat area like Lincolnshire, enormous solar seas such as the Fosse Green project could be seen from the limestone cliff running down the county. Their glint and glare could disturb any onlookers, and they are a particularly big threat to our national treasure, the Red Arrows.

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[Rachel Maclean]

My hon. Friend has made some excellent points. He is right that commercial pressures and the legislation we signed up for—I was happy to vote for that to reach net zero—are driving this between them. We have a lot of unintended outcomes from the policy; it was introduced for laudable aims, but it is time to pause things and look at the matter again.

People have talked about nimbys. It is a really interesting issue, because people will ask, “Where would you put the solar panels instead? Where would you put the additional ones required to fulfil our solar capacity targets?” Our British energy strategy includes ambitions to have 70 GW of solar capacity by 2035, and we are at something like 15.7 GW as of January this year. I believe that if we oppose something and do not like what is in front of us, we should suggest what should be done instead. We should be constructive. We should not just oppose things and not come up with a solution; that is what Labour does, and that is not my style.

On the subject of Labour, by the way, it is unclear to me and local residents what Labour’s position locally is on the solar power project. It should not really surprise anyone that locally Labour is sitting on the fence—or on the solar panel, if I may stretch the metaphor—on the issue. That is what Labour does on every issue: says one thing and does another, or changes its mind every five minutes. It is certainly doing that locally.

People will probably say to me, “Aren’t you just a nimby?” Maybe I should ask myself that as well. As some Members may know, I had the great privilege of serving as the Housing and Planning Minister, and I am familiar with these debates. However, I say to my hon. and right hon. Friends that that is the wrong question and the wrong way of looking at the problem. I will briefly explain why. Deciding where to put infrastructure, whether it is housing, roads or solar farms, will always be controversial. We need to build these things. Nobody wants them next to them and, certainly to my knowledge, nobody has ever campaigned for more development next to them, be it housing or infrastructure.

It is therefore often said that those people must be nimbys and their views should be pushed aside in the interests of progress. There is no easy way around this, even if we prioritise the views of local communities, because the idea that there is anywhere else in the country where somebody will not object to something being built is a fantasy. It is idiotic to divide people into two camps of nimby and not nimby—unless they are Liberal Democrats, of course, who are bananas. That stands for “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone”—that is their policy.

I have the greatest respect for the yimby movement— I really do; it is doing some good things. However, I suspect that were those people to move to a different area, out of the city and into the countryside, next to a development site or into the green belt that was about to be built over, they might change their view. I speak as someone who has a little understanding of the area; I think all of us MPs do. We understand human nature, and we know that people will deceive themselves and others. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but the evidence in front of me strongly suggests that I am right. It is pointless and wrong to attack nimbys when everyone essentially feels the same about our landscape and our area.

[Sir John Hayes]

That is indeed right. If a Member of Parliament does not defend their own area, surely they are not really doing their job, are they? My backyard is South Holland and the Deepings, and I will certainly defend it to the death from the kind of menace represented by this kind of large-scale solar.

[Rachel Maclean]

I really enjoy hearing my right hon. Friend speak about the matter, because more than anyone else he has brought the concept of beauty and its impact on our wellbeing into public policy. I thank him for that.

I will deliberately move away from the concept of blaming people for being nimbys, because unless we understand how human psychology works, we will not be able to solve the problem of where to put things that nobody wants. There is another way to think about this. It is much easier and cheaper to install infrastructure on a virgin field, rather than to engineer it somewhere else in the built environment or on brownfield. That is more favourable, but it will take cash.

If anyone tells us that we can simply complete a project on brownfield for the same cost as on greenfield, they have no idea what they are talking about. Yes, I am looking at Labour, because that is essentially Labour’s plan for reforming the planning system. Why? Brownfield is brown for a reason: something else was there before. That something else needs to be removed and the site put back to a clean condition, which involves removing toxic materials and engineering problems.

That costs money, and that is why we have Government agencies and grants funded to the tune of £10.5 billion, in the case of Homes England, to do exactly that. However, that money is our money; it is taxpayers’ money. If we want more of it, we must spend more money on it, which means less money to spend on all the other things that voters want and the Opposition have promised, such as the NHS and so on.

By the way, Labour has repeatedly said that it wants to build on the green belt, or the grey belt, whatever that is. I will be honest: there is some merit in that argument, but that is because we are already doing that. It is Government policy, when it is done sensibly and in consultation with local communities and backed by Government funding. It is happening all over the country. Where it is not happening is in—surprise, surprise—Labour-run planning authorities, most notably London. Sadiq Khan is woefully behind on all his housing targets, even though he has been generously subsidised to the tune of 4 billion quid by taxpayers from around the country who are not lucky enough to live in London but are subsidising his frankly useless delivery record.

What is sad and shameful about this is that the need for housing and the cost of it is acute in London. The so-called housing crisis, which is just as much an immigration crisis as a housing crisis, is worse in London. In fact, if the Labour Mayor of London built enough houses in the capital, we could meet the annual national quota with room to spare and prevent speculative green belt development in the home counties and around the country, such as in the areas we represent. If we want a planning system that works with local people, we need to take a step back, look at our policy landscape and ask ourselves about the incentives that are driving these unfavourable outcomes.

Taking all the politics out of this, we are talking about human nature and behaviour. It is an illustration of the tragedy of the commons. Projects such as solar farms are needed to meet communal goals such as net zero, and most people agree that renewable energy is a good idea.