Wind Farms (Mid-Wales)

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

This debate is on a subject that is of greater importance to me than any other issue will be during the entire time that I serve as a Member of the House, irrespective of how long that is. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mrs Riordan. You can observe that I am not at my best today—not physically, at least—having had to enter the Chamber on crutches. I will remain dependent on crutches for a while. I am grateful to my surgeon at the excellent Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt hospital in Gobowen, who two weeks ago performed a successful operation on my back. Mr Trivedi is most displeased that I am here this morning. He instructed me to rest at home, but this morning was such a valuable opportunity that I would have allowed myself to be carried in by stretcher. In fact, I thought that that would add a dramatic touch to the occasion, but in the end I decided against it. I certainly hope that it is not the way I will be carried out.

I will start by declaring a sort of interest. I was born in mid-Wales on an upland farm that I still own; today, I live about a mile away from it. I love the landmass that constitutes mid-Wales and could not contemplate living anywhere else on earth. It is a place of great beauty. That beauty is important in the context of the debate because it underpins the most important and largest part of the local economy—tourism. It can be no surprise that I and almost all the disinterested population of mid-Wales are horrified that the proposals about which I intend to speak are even being seriously considered. The consequence of the proposals would be to destroy totally the place that we love by industrialising the uplands with wind turbines and desecrating our valleys with hideous cables and pylons.

For the benefit of everyone, I should outline the sheer scale, and horror, of what is proposed. It is not an ordinary development—the sort of thing that we have seen before. It is the largest ever onshore wind development in England and Wales. The proposals envisage the granting of permission for the erection of between 600 and 800 huge new onshore turbines in mid-Wales—over and above all those that currently exist and those that already have planning approval—a 20-acre electricity substation and about 100 miles of new cable, much of it carried on steel towers 150 feet high. That is scarcely believable. The scale of it is almost impossible to comprehend. Not even the enemies of Britain over the centuries have wrought such wanton destruction on that wondrous part of the United Kingdom.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Is it not a little over the top to suggest that the landscape will be totally destroyed? Even when the turbines are there, although there will, no doubt, be a decline in the visual amenity, will not the mid-Wales area still be beautiful and desirable to the millions of people who live in urban areas?

[Glyn Davies]

I want to come later in my speech to what we will be left with afterwards, but the sheer scale of what is proposed means that the development will cause huge damage. Already people are not prepared to commit themselves to holidays in the long term. Already the prices of houses are falling. The impact is already seriously damaging. There are beautiful parts of Britain; the economy of mid-Wales depends on tourism, which depends on its beauty. What some people want is to act freely to destroy the one thing that makes the place special. That is what the authorities in their various forms are contemplating doing.

When the policy statement or technical advice note popularly known as TAN 8 was issued by the Welsh Assembly Government in 2005, I and a few others understood immediately that this monstrous proposal would be the consequence. However, the local population did not truly grasp the scale of what that policy statement meant. I suppose that it seemed almost too incredible to believe—if only it were. Now that the population of mid-Wales have grasped the degree of desecration planned for their area, there has been an uprising of anger and protest the like of which I have never seen before.

Huge numbers of people, usually approaching 500, have turned up at several public meetings. At one meeting that I called in Welshpool, at short notice and with minimal advertisement, more than 2,000 people turned up. These people are from every sector of the population, and include many who would benefit financially from the proposals. If the National Assembly for Wales had been sitting at the time and not involved in an election, all of them would have descended on Cardiff bay there and then to ensure that the politicians behind this outrage were made fully aware of the scale of the anger.