Large Solar Farms

Neil Parish Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Brendan Clarke-Smith) for bringing it to the House. I concur with him: if we can get fusion right and roll it out economically, that will very much be our energy future.

Sir Charles, you would expect me to talk a little about food security. That issue is being highlighted now. Given the terrible situation with the Russians invading Ukraine and all the destruction going on, not much food will be produced in that breadbasket of the world. We need to stand up to that and produce food and wheat; we can do it. We need to produce poultry and pigs, which need grain. We need this land for grain and food production, so that we can produce really good food and ensure high-quality welfare. Let us ensure that we keep land for food production.

By its very nature, land is finite. At the moment, it is being asked to produce food; however, we are also asking for greater biodiversity, which is highly laudable and right to do, but as we aim for greater biodiversity and more environmental schemes, we will see a reduction in production of food. We do not want to couple that with large solar farms.

We all believe that solar panels have a role to play, and that they produce good-quality electricity, but I would like us to go back to having feed-in tariffs for people’s homes. It does not have to be as high a tariff as it was, because solar panels are very competitively and narrowly priced. Only about 4% of houses have them. Residents in houses that have them love to see the energy coming in and the meter going round, especially when they have high energy bills, as they are being paid for that electricity, rather than paying out for it. This very much involves individual house owners and tenants, and keeps our energy costs down.

From an infrastructure point of view, Western Power Distribution and others have a great deal of difficulty in wiring up and connecting large solar farms. Solar power should therefore be spread across the community, and should be generated on brownfield sites and in industrial buildings. How many industrial buildings do we have in this country? Very few have solar panels on them. We can have both industrial buildings and solar panels, but we must not keep putting the panels on land. We have an opportunity with these large farms.

Another large solar farm of some 200 acres has been proposed near Cullompton. The south-west is God’s own country because of the light, and that makes it popular for solar panels. We have an awful lot of solar panels in Devon and across the west country; we have had our fair share of them. The community needs to be involved when more are proposed.

Solar farms are not beautiful and have industrial-style fencing around them. Why do people come to many of our great constituencies? Because they are beautiful. Tourist love to come to them, but I promise that they do not come looking for solar or wind farms. They come looking for beautiful cattle and sheep grazing peacefully in our countryside. We must be careful how we deal with the situation. As I have emphasised, we are asking our farmers, our landowners and those looking after our countryside to do so much for the environment. We can have energy, but for goodness sake let us put the panels on people’s homes and industrial sites, and not on more good, agricultural land.