Onshore Wind and Solar Generation

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Michael Shanks]

We really are stretching this debate, but I am very happy to discuss this matter. The point has been raised on a number of occasions, and the answer is always the same: it is not delivering energy security at the moment. We have said very clearly that oil and gas plays a crucial role in our energy mix now, and it will continue to play a role for decades to come, but the North sea is already in transition. The reality of the past 10 years under the Conservatives was that more than 70,000 jobs were lost, with no plan for how to deal with it. We are determined to deliver on the transition and on energy security, which will get us off the rollercoaster of fossil fuel prices that we are all still riding.

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Michael Shanks]

I will make a little progress and come back to the right hon. Gentleman. Although we have 90 minutes, I am conscious of time.

This instrument is about making sure that onshore wind projects in England that offer capacity of over 100 MW will be eligible to be consented under the regime. It reflects advances in turbine technology over the last decade, with modern turbines being larger and more powerful. Reintroducing onshore wind into the NSIP regime will provide an appropriate route for nationally significant projects seeking planning consent where they are of a certain scale and complexity, so that local impacts can be carefully balanced against national benefits and the need to meet the UK’s wider decarbonisation goals. This will provide greater confidence for developers and grow the pipeline of potential projects in England once again.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am extremely grateful to the Minister for giving way. He talks about national impact. I wonder what provision there is under this legislation for protected national landscapes. Many of the windiest places in the UK are among our most beautiful, whether it is the hills and mountains of our national parks or the downs of our national landscapes, like the North Wessex downs in my constituency, which was an area of outstanding national beauty but is now a national landscape. Many of my residents are concerned, because the Minister is quite right that the turbines that are now being developed are huge. It is likely to mean that for most of our lifetimes we will lose the landscape to these new developments. Will this system still encompass consideration of protected landscape and make sure that it stays as it is for future generations?

[Michael Shanks]

The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point. As I have always said from the Dispatch Box in this role, there is a balance to be struck here. We need to build nationally important infrastructure, and that does mean much more onshore wind in England to match the significant amount of onshore wind that has been built in Scotland over the past few years, including not far from my constituency. But the balance must be struck with protecting land as well. Even if we build the significant number of projects that are needed, there will still be protections for land in the areas he mentions. The planning system allows for those considerations to be taken into account.

The NSIP regime already includes nuclear and solar. We are saying that the ban on onshore wind introduced by the Conservatives was not a rational decision, so we are bringing it back into this process. [Interruption.] The shadow Minister says that it was absolutely rational, but his party’s former Energy Minister, the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), said that it was “always mad”. I think we should remember that not everybody in the Conservative party agreed with it, including, I suspect, the shadow Minister himself.

Let me come to the second part of the statutory instrument: the question of solar. Solar has been subject to a 50 MW NSIP threshold since it was originally set out in the Planning Act 2008. However, much like onshore wind, solar panel technology has seen significant advances in efficiency, enabling a greater megawatt yield per site. Evidence suggests that the 50 MW threshold is now causing a market distortion. With modern technology, mid-sized generating stations have a generating capacity greater than 50 MW and therefore fall within the NSIP regime. That is likely to be disproportionate to their size, scale and impact. That has resulted in a large amount of ground-mounted solar projects entering the planning system artificially capping their capacity just below the 50 MW threshold, leading to a potentially inefficient use of sites and grid connections.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bowie]

I would be delighted to come back and compare notes on how our respective parties have performed in the local elections on 1 May. The choice before the people of England who are going to the polls on 1 May is quite clear. Where they have a Conservative local authority, they get better services and better value for money, as is being demonstrated right now by the comparison between Birmingham and Bromsgrove. There could not be a better illustration of the difference between Conservative party local delivery and Labour party failure. That is what is on the ballot paper on 1 May, and I will debate the arguments around that with the hon. Member any day of the week.

The Labour Government have made no secret of their plans to double onshore wind and treble solar, to be achieved by empowering themselves while disenfranchising local communities. In Lincolnshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire, they are silencing local opposition. They risk alienating the British public in their costly rush to a renewables-based system without consultation and with no consent.

The race to Clean Power 2030 is being done at the expense of all else. It is being done at the expense of our energy security, our national security and our standards on ethical supply chains. Just last week in this very House, Labour whipped its MPs to vote in favour of allowing Great British Energy to invest in supply chains despite evidence of modern slavery—the Labour party! The week before, the Secretary of State was collaborating with the People’s Republic of China, sacrificing our national security and tacitly admitting that his wrong-headed targets were unachievable without imports made with coal power. Perhaps the Government received advice on how to achieve community consent from President Xi Jinping.

[Kit Malthouse]

I understand that this particular sector is out of fashion with the Government, but one of the other sacrifices is likely to involve Scotland’s, and indeed England’s, precious raptor population. Raptors often suffer as a result of high-density wind farms and are effectively minced as they fly through the air. In California and elsewhere, we see high numbers of bird deaths, particularly birds of prey. Would the Government not be better off, in my hon. Friend’s opinion, putting their time and investment into low-orbit solar, in which the UK, along with Japan, leads the world?

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

As well as the contempt being shown for local communities and consultation, does my hon. Friend lament the lack of imagination? There are plenty of places where many people would welcome solar farms, such as on motorway and railway embankments. They could easily be delineated for such development, and it would not necessarily impact on our landscape. There is also the continuing lack of any compulsion for the inclusion of solar on warehouse roofs. We could probably create exactly the same amount of power as his constituency is likely to create by putting solar panels on the roof of every warehouse in Park Royal to the west of London. Again and again, we look to virgin land first, rather than being imaginative about better solutions.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point, with which I wholeheartedly agree. The Government have a target of building 1.5 million—sorry, that was downgraded in the spring statement to 1.3 million—new homes. It would be sensible for them to implement some sort of legislation that would mean that those 1.3 million new homes had solar panels on their roofs. I urge the Minister to ask what assessment has been done on how much energy could be generated were we to do that at full scale instead of building solar farms on our best rural heartlands.