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.

Energy Bill [Lords]

John Hayes Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 5th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dr Whitehead]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The campaign that he may be referring to was signed up to by the Minister when he was not a Minister; he may have some other views on that these days, but the new clause is not too far from the original document that he signed a while ago. I am going to have to make some rapid progress, so I am sorry to say that I will not be able to take any further interventions. However, I will try to get through the measures we are proposing as quickly as possible, in order to allow other Members who are bursting to get into the debate the time to do that.

Our new clause 56 deals with delinking renewables and gas prices. A mechanism should be in place to ensure that the dividend from renewable power costs and prices can come through to customers. However, as we have seen in the recent power crisis, that is not the case at the moment. Gas prices surged to nine times the price of renewable power at some stages during the energy crisis and are still substantially more expensive than those of renewables, but they rule the roost as far as energy prices for the retail market are concerned, through marginal cost pricing. We think that needs to change through delinking the process and we wish to put an amendment in that would ensure that that happened, so that the benefit of renewable power can come to customers in the way that the whole House would intend to happen.

New clause 57 deals with onshore wind. Three minutes before the Bill came to the Floor of the House, a written statement on onshore wind was made by the Minister. I have had a chance to read it quickly and it seems to me as though it still treats onshore wind as a special case and not as an ordinary case of a local infrastructure project, which should receive no better and no worse consideration than any other such project. Onshore wind is essential to the decarbonisation of our energy system, but we have just let it collapse over a considerable period by, in effect, banning it. The Government are taking grandmother’s footsteps back from the ban, but this is still not good enough.

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

I was one of the architects of what the hon. Gentleman described as a ban. He will understand that, when onshore wind was no longer permitted across the UK, this catalysed the offshore industry and we became a world leader in offshore wind precisely because developers then chose to go offshore. Offshore wind has many advantages, not least its scale, the size of the turbines and the single point of connection to the grid. Onshore wind has none of those virtues.

[Dr Whitehead]

That is remarkably like saying I am encouraging you to use your second car because I shot the tyres out of your first car. The right hon. Member makes a quite ridiculous statement.

First, onshore wind is the cheapest form of power available. Secondly, it can be available for community and local energy, in the way described earlier. Thirdly, through CfDs, it can systemically provide a cheaper power environment for the population as a whole. It is a disgrace that only two turbines have been commissioned in this country since February 2022. It is a golden opportunity for decarbonisation that we are missing completely.

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[Dr Whitehead]

Lack of investment does indeed have a direct impact. If we go back and look at what could have been the case and look at what is the case now, there is a direct link between energy prices now and the lack of development of onshore wind. Our amendment, which we hope to push to a vote, would make the way that onshore wind was treated simple and straightforward: it should be treated no differently from any other local infrastructure project. There should be the same protections, safeguards and concerns for people who have that local infrastructure coming their way. It should not be a special case, over and above other projects, which I think will produce an explosion of investment in onshore wind in future.

[Sir John Hayes]

On that point, will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Whitehead]

No. I have to make progress.

New clause 61—

“National Warmer Homes and Businesses Action Plan (No. 2)”—

addresses another area in which the Government have set out their aspirations. The Minister has said that the Government are making progress on their aspirations to retrofit homes, as set out in their national energy plans and the White Paper, “Powering our net zero future”. Those aspirations include having all homes at an EPC band C standard by 2035 and all private rented properties at band B by 2030. However, nowhere are there any plans about how we are actually going to do that or how homes that are among the worst insulated in Europe can be lifted to the levels needed by 2035. The Government are stuck with aspirations but no plan.

Our new clause puts a plan in place. It puts those aspirations into legislation and requires a Government plan to bring them about, which would be another enormous win for decarbonisation. People’s energy bills will fall, fuel poverty will be tackled and gas supply in retrofitted properties will reduce by perhaps 25%. It would be a win all round.

The Government have no plan. Labour has a substantial plan, which has already been put forward, including a 10-year programme to uprate and retrofit 19 million homes, costing £6 billion per annum by the second part of the next Labour Government, with a local authority and community base getting it done. That will transform the present, pretty paltry progress that has been made. Admittedly, there has been good progress in some areas, including the energy company obligation, the local authority delivery scheme, the home upgrade grant and other schemes, but who can forget the spectacular failure of the Government’s green homes grant a little while ago? Our new clause will transform the way that works and we want it to be added to the Bill.

New clause 62 is closely associated with new clause 61, but addresses the private rented sector.

New clause 59 is very important. We want to see the decarbonisation of our energy, power and electricity systems by 2030. The Government’s ambition at the moment is mostly to decarbonise the power system by 2035, but, again, they have no plan as to how that will actually happen. They have given no indication as to what steps they will take to achieve this, and they are certainly beginning to fail in the implementation of carbon budgets. Bringing forward the decarbonisation of the power system would greatly enhance that and allow us to meet our targets. Labour wants to see the complete decarbonisation of the system by 2030. That does involve massive uplifts in the rate of progress—for example, in offshore wind by five, in solar by three, and in onshore by two—and, indeed, the development of other renewables. In that regard, I recommend that hon. Members have a look at new clause 51.

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[Alicia Kearns]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: farmers want to conserve and to grow the food of this nation. They do not want to turn to solar, which landowners are often doing.

[Sir John Hayes]

Further to the intervention made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie), meanwhile, solar on buildings is absent. One drives around the country and sees huge warehouses, commercial buildings and office blocks with not a solar panel to be seen. Those panels are going on to land that should be growing food to produce the food security that this country needs. Food security and energy security combined means national resilience.

[Alicia Kearns]

I absolutely agree. That is why I still urge the Government to bring forward a strategy on rooftop solar—they can do so.

Turning to new clause 47, the UK has tough modern slavery laws. It is evident that we want to do something about that issue, but we cannot outsource the protection of human rights. There are developers who utilise forced labour in their supply chains—who not only violate our ethical and moral values but, as I say, pose a commercial risk. We cannot be reliant on Uyghur slave labour. Alan Crawford and Laura Murphy recently released landmark reports into the use of Uyghur forced labour in solar supply chains. They have made very clear that across the UK, there is just too much. Some 40% of all solar that is built in the UK is affected, and 45% of all polysilicon and solar panels around the world come from Xinjiang—they are made with slave labour. It is shocking to see that five pages of the recent report from Sheffield Hallam were dedicated to just one supplier, Canadian Solar, which is planning to build in this country and is a serial applicant. These same companies are tariff dodging repeatedly and trying to hide the reality of what they are doing.

My new clause 47 is very straightforward: it seeks to increase transparency. When a Minister makes a decision on a proposal of this magnitude, they should have full sight of whether there is forced slave labour within the application. Currently, a Minister making a decision on a nationally significant infrastructure project has no idea if the vast majority of the product to be put on British soil will be made with slave labour. I hope this will deter these companies and force them to finally choose to produce polysilicon without slave labour. There is no onus on the Government, there is no cost implication for them and I am not forcing their; I am asking for transparency, not least given that the US and the EU have both brought forward enormous Bills that deal with forced Uyghur labour in their countries or their areas of influence.

We have done nothing, and the reality is that we never walk the walk, but just talk the talk when it comes to the Uyghur. I cannot think of one piece of legislation that this Government have brought forward since my election that deals with Uyghur slave labour, yet we go to Beijing and then claim that we have raised it, based on no reality. Unfortunately, I have heard absolutely nothing today to reassure me that we genuinely want to deal with this, and that we recognise that it is not just in solar but across the energy footprint and is not just in China but in other places where components are made with slave labour. Therefore, at the moment I am minded to press the new clause to make sure that we finally deal with the reality of what we are facing and get some transparency within the system for our Ministers.

Planning and Solar Farms

John Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 19th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Dr Johnson]

I could not agree with my hon. Friend more. In some respects, he has paraphrased my speech into a few sentences very eloquently, so I thank him. I ask the Minister to ensure that when the Government improve infrastructure they do not destroy the countryside in the process. The scale of these applications is quite difficult to imagine from a map alone, though I see that my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) has brought a map with him today. Each covers around 2,000 or more acres—that is just over 3 square miles. Some of these NSIP applications are larger than that, sometimes substantially.

I would also like to raise the threat of glint and glare from light reflecting off solar panels. In Lincolnshire this is especially significant due to the presence of the RAF. The Red Arrows operate from RAF Waddington, which sits on the edge of my constituency. The limestone cliff top means that the Fosse Way site that is being proposed will be an especially visible eyesore from across the constituency. Many of my constituents choose to live in a rural setting because of the superb views, which solar farms threaten to spoil entirely. The impact will also extend to house prices. Many of my constituents fear that houses with unburdened views will sell for much more, leaving residents individually out of pocket as well.

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

Before my hon. Friend moves to her next incisive and powerful point, I wonder whether she might recognise, given her expertise in this field, as my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) said, that arable land available to grow the food that we need to be secure is at its lowest level since 1945 and is being lost at around 100,000 acres a year; we lost over 750,000 acres in the 10 years to 2019. We cannot have it both ways: either we have food security from the production of domestically produced foodstuffs or we give up land for solar and onshore wind.

[Dr Johnson]

As ever, my right hon. Friend is right and has read my mind—I was going to move on to talk about food production.

I am particularly concerned about the use of good agricultural land because farming is a cornerstone of my constituency. It does not just form the backbone of the economy in my constituency, but it has evolved to underpin the area’s very culture. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have revealed the fragility of the global food market, so it is more important than ever that we make strides towards becoming agriculturally self-sufficient.

I am informed by the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership that Lincolnshire alone produces 30% of the UK’s vegetables and 18% of its poultry, and is responsible for 12% of the country’s total food production—all from a county covering less than 3% of the UK’s land mass. Lincolnshire, without a doubt, has some of the UK’s best and most versatile farmland, yet it seems to be particularly targeted by large solar farms.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Mrs Wheeler) is not able to take part in this debate today, but she told me that she has similar issues in her constituency, and is particularly aggrieved by the loss of good agricultural land. I am aware of the concerns of Members of the House of Lords, too, including Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who told me of his concerns about the use of good-quality agricultural land local to him for solar farms.

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[Richard Foord]

The Liberal Democrats in general are, and I in particular am, very much in favour of renewable energy, and I am happy to put that on the record. On solar in particular, some of the proposals for solar farms, as they are called, are too large; we need to distribute and disperse such renewable energy projects so that they do not take up vast tracts of land, as they do in my constituency.

[Sir John Hayes]

I was going to ask the same question as my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray). To clarify further, is the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) saying that he is against large solar developments on prime land? Or is he is saying that he wants many more of them and for them to be spread, meaning he would presumably like many more applications, in many more places, for smaller solar farms that eat up agricultural land?

[Richard Foord]

I am certainly in favour of more and more distributed solar energy generation. I am not in favour of some of the enormous solar complexes, including in my part of Devon, where an enormous amount is foisted on sometimes very small communities.

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[Sir Edward Leigh]

I am worried about where those companies come from. This has all grown up very suddenly and they have huge financial resources. I suspect that they are not very interested in Lincolnshire; they are based in London. They are a group of entrepreneurs who are going to make shedloads of money and then sell the planning application on. They do not care a damn about us.

[Sir John Hayes]

When I became the Energy Minister, I assumed that the renewable industry would be full of people like Richard Briers of the Good family. Remember the Goods in “The Good Life”? They were people interested in keeping goats in their garden and doing a lot of composting. In fact, they were the kind of people who drove flashy sportscars and had been selling double glazing the week before. It is clear that this is not about the environment and renewable energy; it is about getting rich quick.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

In that brief period of the Government of my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), the then Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Jayawardena), tried to change the definition to include 3b land. A huge mountain of well-funded lobbying money was put in immediately to frustrate the whole process. Make no mistake: this is not about the countryside and it is not about producing green energy in the right controlled way. It is about money. Some people are going to get very rich indeed.

Solar power has a vital part to play, but solar panels belong in moderate amounts—perhaps—on poor agricultural land, atop buildings and on brownfield sites, not on good farmland. Put them on top of large logistics centres at the side of motorways. Sit them on top of factories and industrial buildings. Put them on schools and houses, by all means, but good land needs to be kept in agricultural use.

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

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate, Ms Nokes, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on securing it. Like her, I take a profound interest—as she and certainly my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) will know—in all matters that concern the great county of Lincolnshire. They are right to say that Lincolnshire is disproportionately affected by this matter. Similarly, Lincolnshire is disproportionately the area that grows much of the food that is consumed across our country and which fills shop shelves and pantries in homes, so it is right that we take a profound interest in the use of its land to grow the crops we need to assure our country’s energy security.

I will speak about three things in this brief but telling contribution: energy, the environment and agriculture. When I was the Energy Minister, I discovered that it is critical for any country’s energy policy to have an energy mix—some baseload energy of the kind provided with nuclear power and some flexible energy that can respond to changing patterns of demand, because demand for energy is unpredictable. Of course, it is true that we heat and light our homes more in winter, but we can get sudden surges of demand, for instance, in a particularly cold snap, so we need flexible energy provision of the kind provided, for example, by gas.

Renewables are an important part of that mix. They do not have the flexibility of fossil fuels but are important in delivering our ambitions on carbon emissions. Renewables are not a good per se; they need to be in the right places and deliver the right volume of energy.

On those terms, when I was the Energy Minister and later in Downing Street and in the Cabinet Office, I was partly responsible for the moratorium on onshore wind. That had the effect—I would not want to suggest that I knew this at the time; I was not prophetic—of driving wind power offshore and catalysing the extraordinary success of our offshore wind industry. When the developers could not build onshore, they looked to how they could maximise offshore production and developed specialisms in doing so, which became world beating. Offshore wind is infinitely preferable to onshore wind for many reasons: first, because of the volume, size and number of turbines and the amount of energy that can be produced; and, secondly, because there is a single point of transmission back to the grid, rather than multiple points.

That brings me to solar, because solar is much the same: it is important but it needs to be in the right place. For the most part, solar should be on buildings. It is extraordinary that we drive around our country and see a proliferation of every kind of large building, particularly warehouses, without a solar panel anywhere near them, yet, simultaneously, we have these applications for large-scale solar farms on prime agricultural land. By prime, I mean grades 1, 2, 3a and 3b. Even grade 4 land is actually not entirely unproductive, but certainly in Lincolnshire, where there is a great deal of grade 1, 2 and 3 land, it is preposterous that on that very land, which could be making more of the food that our country needs, we put these huge solar developments.

I say to the Minister, who is sensitive to these subjects—I met him recently to discuss them, and I know that he is an extremely good and diligent member of this Government—that we need to refocus our efforts on developing on-building solar. Successive Governments have been inadequate in that respect.

What about the environment? The environment and an interest in the climate are related but not synonymous. Of course, the climate affects the environment, but the environment is more than just the climate. The environment is a matter of ergonomics, but it is also a matter of aesthetics. We either want to preserve what my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) called our green and pleasant land, and believe in our landscape and its use, or we do not. I do, frankly; I want our countryside to continue to be productive and beautiful. Why should we not make a case for beauty? I have been doing so in relation to buildings for years, so let me now do so about our landscape and countryside.

Do we really want to continue to industrialise the countryside? People say to me, “These solar developments will not last long.” How long, and why would another application simply not be put in at the end of the life of the solar development? As for onshore wind, it is not the turbine but the concrete that anchors it that will last forever. Solar panels on buildings are therefore essential to protect our environment.

The third thing I want to talk about is agriculture. Colleagues across the House understand, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough said, that a combination of the covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine has refocused attention on how we can be more secure, both in energy and in food production. That is a delight to those of us, like my right hon. Friend and I, who have wanted to protect our economy for years. We have started to see the liberal obsession with free trade unravel, and that is a very good thing. In essence, that means that whereas the proportion of food produced in this country has declined over our lifetimes—we used to make more of the food that we consume here in Britain—we now need to move in the opposite direction. That will not happen if we use up all the land for these other things.

In the 30 seconds I have left, let me say this: this is an argument about energy, but it is actually an argument about much more than that. I hope that the Minister will be characterised, as he looks back on his legacy, as being the man who for the first time took seriously our concern for the environment, our need for an appropriate energy mix and our belief in British food for British consumers.

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[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Nokes and to respond to what has been a genuinely interesting and thought-provoking debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on securing the debate and thank all hon. Members who have participated this afternoon.

Last year was the UK’s warmest on record and one of the sixth warmest ever recorded globally. The record-breaking temperatures we experienced last summer, including our first ever 40-degree day, caused an unprecedented number of heat-related deaths, wildfire incidents and disruption to infrastructure. Yet the occasionally severe weather we experienced last year is only a foretaste of what is to come, unless our country plays its full part in decisively slowing the rate of global heating to prevent it reaching catastrophic levels. On that, I think the room is ostensibly agreed.

The science, as we all know, is unequivocal. Bold action is required and it is required now. However, when it comes to the UK’s net zero emissions target, the Government have consistently been long on aspiration but short on tangible progress. The UK’s nationally determined contribution requires emissions reductions of 68% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels and the Government’s sixth carbon budget requires them to be slashed by 78% by 2035. Yet in their June 2023 progress report, the Climate Change Committee states plainly that its confidence in the achievement of both targets

“has markedly declined from last year.”

Put simply, the overall pace of climate delivery under the Government remains woefully inadequate.

If our country is to meet its interim targets, reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and lower energy bills for consumers, the Government need to do far better, including when it comes to the domestic deployment of established low-cost technologies such as solar. Having over recent years subjected solar to a series of erratic policy changes and reductions in support, including slashing rates for the feed-in tariff scheme in 2015, the British energy security strategy published in April of last year finally provided a welcome measure of certainty, committing the Government to a fivefold increase in solar deployment by 2035 and taking levels from the current 14 GW of capacity, the bulk of which is ground-mounted, to 70 GW.

The Government have also been clear as to the scale of solar deployment likely to be necessary to meet the UK’s wider net zero targets, with a technical annex to the “Power Up Britain” policy paper published in March suggesting that approximately 90 GW of solar will ultimately be necessary. Yet last year saw just 0.7 GW of new solar deployed, in a rate of installation that falls well short of what is required to meet the Government’s target. As the Climate Change Committee has stated in its 2023 progress report,

“The deployment of solar capacity is significantly off track to meet the Government’s target of 70 GW by 2035.”

To get on track for that target, the committee makes clear that the Government need to facilitate the delivery of

“An average annual deployment rate of 3.4 GW”.

This House can debate what the precise split should be between large and smaller-scale projects, what types of land should be prioritised for solar deployment and how we best maximise the efficiency of land that is utilised. However, the only fundamental question is precisely how we markedly drive up solar deployment rates, not whether we need to. Moreover, every hon. Member who is engaging with the debate today in good faith needs to at least have an answer as to how the extra 3.6 GW of annual solar capacity implied in the Government’s target should be accomplished.

[Sir John Hayes]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Surely he recognises that by far the best way of doing so is to put solar on buildings. Every public building, warehouse, agricultural building, office and industrial estate could have and should have solar. The advantage of that would be to bring energy production and consumption into closer union and reduce transmission and distribution costs that make up about 15% of every energy bill.

[Matthew Pennycook]

The right hon. Gentleman has a lot of expertise in this area, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. He pre-empts a point that I will come to. We think the Government should be far more ambitious and creative about rooftop solar, which we think can meet the bulk of our solar needs.

As the House is aware, the Labour party has committed to delivering a zero emission power system by 2030—five years ahead of the Government’s target date—and we assess that honouring that commitment will require us to triple the deployment of solar by the end of this decade to up to 50 GW of capacity. We are under no illusions: we know that is a stretching target, but it is essential to achieving zero carbon power by the end of the decade, and a Labour Government will do what is necessary to meet it.

Our plans are premised on a significant uplift in solar photovoltaic deployment on rooftops, which analysis suggests could provide the bulk of the 50 GW of capacity that we want to be installed by 2030. I think hon. Members are broadly in complete agreement on that point. As I said, we want the Government to be far more ambitious and creative in how they do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bowie]

Absolutely not. There is no automatic green-light system, and I am assured that every proposal is looked at on a case-by-case basis and on its merits, taking into account the opinions and concerns of the local communities it will affect.

The NPPF makes it clear that local planning authorities should have a positive strategy for producing energy from renewable and low-carbon sources, such as solar farms. It sets out that where a significant development of agricultural land is shown to be necessary, areas of poorer quality should be used in preference to those of higher quality. If it is proposed to use any land that falls under Natural England’s BMV classification—best and most versatile agricultural land—that needs to be justified during consideration of the planning application. As defined in the NPPF, “best and most versatile agricultural land” constitutes land in grades 1, 2 and 3a of the agricultural land classification planning decisions, and decisions should continue to be made based on that definition. However, I have heard the concerns raised by hon. Members, and I will ensure that DLUHC Ministers are made aware of them.

[Sir John Hayes]

I know time is brief, but can we take it that there is a presumption against development on prime agricultural land—certainly grades 1, 2 and 3a? I take the point about 3b, but let us just deal with the first three. Is there a presumption against the kind of development that takes valuable land out of food production?

[Andrew Bowie]

My right hon. Friend will have heard my earlier contributions. We are determined to ensure that land is protected for food security reasons and that this green and pleasant land that we are all so proud to represent continues to be just that. However, I understand the concerns of right hon. and hon. Members, so I will ensure that DLUHC Ministers hear them loud and clear.

Before I conclude, I will briefly turn to the issue of slave labour and China. My hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton knows my personal position on the issue, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office will have heard loud and clear her representations here today. We are supporting the UK solar industry’s main trade association, Solar Energy UK, in leading the response from business to include securing the solar panel industry’s commitment to a robust supply chain traceability protocol, supporting a global co-ordinated response from the solar industry—the Solar Stewardship Initiative—and communicating relevant UK and international human rights frameworks. I will meet my hon. Friend in due course to discuss her proposed new clause to the Energy Bill.

I am grateful to all right hon. and hon. Members for attending today and to my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham for securing this important debate. I will of course ensure that DLUHC and DEFRA Ministers are made aware of the issues and serious matters raised this afternoon. We are committed to reforming policy so that it continues to complement wider Government ambitions: food security and preserving agricultural land, reforming the infrastructure planning system that focuses on improving community engagement, and introducing a new framework of environmental assessment through DLUHC’s Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. I once more thank everybody for their contributions this afternoon.