Renewable Energy Providers: Planning Considerations

Siobhan Baillie Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered planning considerations for renewable energy providers.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I am biased, but I think you can never have too many Siobhans in one room. It is great to be here, and I thank everyone for joining us so early on a Wednesday.

This debate really matters to my constituents and local businesses. They are environmentally focused and trying to do the right thing by our planet and for our children and grandchildren, but planning barriers and delays are holding back the renewable potential of the Stroud district and the UK. It is taking years to deliver projects—big projects and little ones alike—and it is not good enough for our constituents, who really want to see progress.

We know that renewable energy sources, as well as critical transmission infrastructure such as grid connections, are vital for the UK to reach net zero by 2050 and decarbonise the power sector by 2035. I have argued for years that technological innovation will provide the solutions that help the UK beat our 2050 target. There are also countless businesses in the Stroud district that show me they will achieve this, because they are leading the way nationally and internationally. It is our businesses that will win the climate battle. It will not be me gluing myself to things or sitting on roads, or getting arrested and stopping people getting to work or going to hospital appointments. I am not going to spend my time being a permanent protester or refusing to recognise where the UK is doing well, just for a political agenda. I want to find practical solutions, and I am going to get things done, using this place in any way I can.

The development of renewables should clearly continue at pace while we transition from oil and gas. The state and local government should protect residents where necessary, but they have to get out of the way wherever possible, and without the taxpayer—all our constituents and everyone in this room—subsidising eco-businesses up the wazoo.

Even in virtue-signalling councils that have declared a climate emergency, planning barriers are causing difficulties for local people. For example, I need clever civil servants and the excellent Minister to help me with issues relating to solar tracking. A local company called Bee Solar Technology contacted me about this many years ago. It is run by a female entrepreneur who, to be frank, gives me a really hard time because she is fed up with some of the problems, but she impresses me every day with her knowledge and desire to make things better for everybody.

Solar tracking systems rotate and follow the sun all day from sunrise to sunset, which enables them to generate more power than static roof or ground-mounted systems. In simple terms, six panels tracking the sun equal approximately 10 panels of static roof system. Fewer panels are needed, and as they are ground-mounted and freestanding, they can be cleaned easily to ensure that we are getting maximum bang for our buck. They can generate direct current electricity from sunlight, even on cloudier days, and people can take the device with them if they move. It works for small homes and big, posh homes, and it can heat a swimming pool, a summer house or a little office at the bottom of the garden.

When we talk about solar, we tend to talk about roof panels, and actually, all the drama is in the massive solar farms, which I will come on to. But people are not well aware of the technology coming through; local planning departments and councils are certainly not. I am not criticising roof panels, as Members will see. I believe they have a vital role to play, particularly against the big solar farms, but everybody I explain solar tracking to thinks it is a really good idea. Indeed, Bee Solar Technology gets lots of inquiries and has won awards, yet it has found that planners do not want to engage or learn properly about new technology, which I think is due to a mixture of being very busy in their jobs, caution and laziness.

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

The hon. Lady is enlightening us about how solar technology is moving on. On the point about local authorities, I have been approached by the Blackdown Hills Parish Network, a network of councils in my area that represent the Blackdown Hills area of outstanding natural beauty. It suggests that the problem might not be local authority planners but the national planning policy framework that planners have to work in accordance with. Specifically, it fails to give sufficient emphasis to the climate emergency, ecological decline and the principle of leaving the environment in a better state than when we inherited it. Does the hon. Member agree?

[Siobhan Baillie]

I think this is part of the problem. I love parish councils—they often follow the real detail of planning applications and have battles on a day-to-day basis—but while what the hon. Member proposes sounds very worthy and important, what we want is not statements but the mechanisms. At the moment, we have local authorities blaming the Government and the Government saying local authorities have the power, and local people are caught in the middle. I am happy to work with him to look at the NPPF—we know we are getting a new draft; it has been too slow and we need that information soon—but I want to avoid any more well-meaning rhetoric and get to the bottom of how we get some of these projects over the line. That is really important.

Going back to solar tracking, planning applications are getting rejected. Few people can afford to pay for an expensive planning consultant, and they obviously do not want to engage in local long-standing appeals. The Government planning portal on solar planning regulations makes no reference to solar tracking systems because the technology was not available when the regs were published.

I and Melissa Briggs from Bee Solar have done our best to raise awareness. We have written to endless Ministers and Secretaries of State, from even before I became the Member of Parliament for Stroud. The current position is as follows:

“The installation of solar panels and equipment on residential buildings and land may be ‘permitted development’ with no need to apply to the Local Planning Authority for planning permission.”

At that point, we think, “Woo-hoo! We can get there”, but then it goes on:

“There are, however, important limits and conditions, detailed on the following pages, which must be met to benefit from these permitted development rights”—

and the list is long. The conditions set out are not too problematic, but the fact that they must all be met could be. I will give some examples. First,

“No part of the installation should be higher than four metres”.

Why? Nobody can explain the 4-metre rule. It seems pretty arbitrary. The Bee solar systems are 4.3 metres when they are at their most vertical, but just under 4 metres for most of the day. What difference does it make if it is in someone’s private garden or business space whether it is 4 metres or 4.3 metres? We have already established that it is an acceptable amenity of the area. I ask the Minister: can the limit be at least 5 metres, or can we have no restriction at all unless there is a serious visual issue?

Secondly,

“The installation should be at least 5m from the boundary of the property”.

Again, why? That precludes people with smaller gardens, narrow gardens and smaller homes from being able to install renewable technology. Should only people with huge personal land be permitted to benefit from renewable technologies? Can that be reduced to 2.5 metres or be at the discretion of councils, depending on the circumstances?

Finally,

“The size of the array should be no more than 9 square metres or 3m wide by 3m deep”.

Why? Where has the 9 metres come from? Solar panels have grown since the legislation was published in 2011. They were about 200 W then and are now about 400 W, and panels of upwards of 500 W are becoming commonplace. Can the requirement be removed or adapted to at least 15 square metres, or is there another way through?

I need the Minister and the Department to answer these questions, because I am banging my head against a brick wall. I want them to look closely at whether local authorities already have the powers—even though some of them do not think that they have them—to grant permission for these things, or whether we need to change the regulations. If so, I will work night and day with the Minister to make that happen.

Although I have highlighted the specific technology of solar tracking, the realities of what I have just explained apply to other issues with renewables. Often the planning systems or the planners and the councils—it sounds as though I am giving local authorities a hard time, but they are at the coalface of local people’s applications and inquiries—do not reflect the up-to-date world that we live in, and planners are blaming the Government, so it goes round in a big circle. Without clarity, local people cannot face battling with planning authorities and do not have the resources to engage experts. They will give up—and who can blame them, in some circumstances?

I give my thanks to another organisation, the Big Solar Co-Op, and to Maria Ardley, who is a Stroud co-ordinator. She has set out a number of issues that it faces in trying to get solar on to commercial rooftops. I think we can all agree that that is a good thing to do. The BSC is a national community energy organisation aiming to unlock the huge potential of rooftop solar to cut carbon emissions. Its target is to install 100 MW by 2030, which is equivalent to the energy used by about 30,000 homes. The Stroud team has a target of 400 KW of rooftop solar energy in the first year, which is about eight tennis courts’ worth of roof space. However, it is coming up against some big problems that it had not really appreciated would be there, particularly in an area that is so environmentally focused and a council that is so committed to tackling the climate emergency.

There are plenty of large rooftops in our area that could host solar panels. As a non-profit group, the Big Solar Co-Op is pretty attractive to building managers and business owners, because there is no capital cost. The financial and carbon savings to be made are important for head, heart and planet, but as I said, the planning barriers are holding them back. Maria explained to me that a presumption in favour of rooftop solar, as is the case with Kensington and Chelsea Council, would make things easier for BSC in Stroud and nationally. It allows for well-designed, aesthetically responsible arrays to be professionally designed and installed, even on listed buildings. That could make a huge difference.

I also have a lot of time for CPRE as a charity. The Gloucestershire CPRE works incredibly hard to scrutinise planning applications that affect the countryside and nature and will no doubt have a lot to say about the NPPF needing to be updated, as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) said. I note that its position in response to wide concerns about solar farms is to reiterate its commitment to rooftop solar policies. Similarly, Heritage England has released guidance on how to install solar in a way that is sensitive and respectful to the building in question and not scaling out listed buildings.

At the moment, the BSC is working on a fabulous building called the Speech House hotel in the Forest of Dean. I have permission to mention that my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) and his team have been contacted about this recently, so they will be working through the issues too. Due to the rules on curtilage, the owners of the Speech House hotel and BSC must go through full planning application and hire a planning consultant. That is costly and cannot be done each time by a not-for-profit organisation. If the rules are not changed, BSC may have to rule out listed buildings, when these are exactly the properties that we need to help. Gill, the owner of the Speech House hotel, has said:

“We are particularly keen to reduce our carbon footprint as quickly as possible as well as having the need to reduce our overall energy costs. The hotel uses a great amount of electricity daily to provide the services that our customers need and want. These costs have more than doubled over the last twelve months. As a major employer in the Forest of Dean, not only do we need to be sustainable, but also, we need to be able to control our costs to maintain employment and levels of business.”

This is a sensible, conscientious employer who is struggling to make progress. She has a brilliant organisation in BSC, which is raring to help. However, I am informed that the Forest of Dean planners did not engage or inform BSC about the visit to the property, and it has been unable to discuss the matter with them. It has been reported to me that Stroud and other councils find it difficult to engage with planners.

I would be grateful to hear the Minister’s response to the issues raised about applying rooftop solar to commercial buildings and to how issues related to listed buildings could be addressed. Will Ministers replicate what councils such as Kensington and Chelsea Council are doing, or say from the Front Bench whether councils can follow and do this unilaterally right now? That would be helpful, and we could then send that to all councils.

On solar farms—I really appreciate the indulgence of my colleagues on this issue—I represent a rural area, and quite a few constituents have contacted me about the rise of solar farms in the last few years. They are concerned that they are ruining our countryside, with little thought for food security or the future of farming. A meeting with the hard-working Ham and Stone parish council last week brought home the pressures that our small rural villages and communities are under from the development of massive solar farms. Stroud District Council granted permission for a large solar farm at World’s End farm against the advice of the parish council and highways.

At a similar time, neighbouring South Gloucestershire Council approved another massive solar farm, which will effectively join up with the other solar farm and create a huge loss of green space. The practical consequence for residents, post-permission, is that they are trying to work out how the delivery of hundreds of solar panels will work; they will have to come down rural country lanes, past a primary school and over a very weak bridge. I have met a few local families who are devastated by this planning decision.

Local people are worried about climate change and care about the environment, but they feel under siege. Arlingham village fought long and hard against a huge solar farm there; long-standing relationships were broken, and there was a very upsetting loss for one family. A local councillor also told me that during the Arlingham case, it was established that Stroud District Council had already met its renewable energy targets, so local people were perplexed about why the Green-led council was approving planning applications that are wrong for small areas.

This issue has become entirely confused and quite worrying. I have a good friend and constituent who runs a business, and I trust him to provide me with sensible, constructive information about solar farms. That business spends a lot of time consulting local people, and if it is going to apply for a solar farm, it will ensure that it works for the local community. He sets out that the total UK land covered by solar panels is 0.1%, and under 0.2% of agricultural land, yet that is not how many of our communities feel. They feel that solar farms are here, and that there will be more coming, but the Government have not quite got on to the issue.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing a debate that is definitely timely. She raises the issue of consultation. Does she agree that consultation on proposals as far in advance as possible is essential? Local people, whether they are businesses or neighbours, need to understand completely what is coming, so that they can accommodate it where possible. If there is a rising tide of opposition, the applicants need to understand why that is, and try to amend their proposals to take account of any concerns in the area.

[Siobhan Baillie]

I could not agree with the hon. Gentleman more; he says it far more eloquently than I ever could. Consultation is key, and good businesses, as Low Carbon has been, are getting caught in the mix with others who are riding roughshod over local people, and with situations where consultation is not happening. Also, where big solar farms are coming in, there is no compensation to local areas, unlike in the case of wind and other developments.

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

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s contribution to this debate, but my experience of these things is quite different from hers. As both Minister with responsibility for energy and as a local MP, I did not see friendly, local energy companies that wanted to go to the local community. I saw profit-hungry and greedy big firms that did not give a damn what the local people felt. Let us be frank about these kind of businesses: they are less interested in energy than money.

[Siobhan Baillie]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. He is an incredibly experienced local MP with ministerial experience in this field as well. Sadly, our experience on the ground with a lot of applications has been of big applications and big companies not listening to local people. However, I have found a good company and gone through the steps that it takes, and I think it is important for everyone to say that such companies exist. They are the ones that should win out.

A local area is under threat from an application for a potentially huge solar farm, and there would be two tenant farmers in the middle of it. Tenant farms are like gold dust—it is really difficult for any of us to find them for our constituent farmers—yet those farmers will lose their livelihood and home to landowners who could not care a jot about anything. Food security issues are also getting muddled in the mix. I want to highlight what we can achieve by working with good companies, by working sensitively, and by working with communities with solar farms—it is possible to do. It would be remiss of me to be completely down on these things, but I am incredibly worried.

I think that Ministers have said that the rules on solar farms should be changed to protect agricultural land. The Government need to define the protections for land used in food production to make it easier for communities to decide whether a solar farm application is right in the light of the UK’s long-term food security issues. I give credit to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), who has done an amazing amount of work, and has proposed amendments that I know the Government have looked at carefully, but such changes will need to go hand in hand with changes to planning rules about rooftop solar, or massive farms will always fill the gaps. Will the Minister give us an update on the issue of solar farms, to reassure local people that even though local planning is erratic, the Government are taking steps to protect agricultural land? What is happening, and when will we feel it on the ground? When will we feel those protections that we say are coming?

Turning to national barriers, I have had some really amazing briefings, and my thanks go to people who are sending them in, including the Conservative Environment Network and RenewableUK. I defer on this to my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), who will speak for me on a number of the things that she is concerned about. When it comes to the national grid, we want to see the Government looking more lively. The new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero said at an Onward conference event that she had 99 problems and they are all the national grid. I know that she is working really hard on it, but again, we need to see the detail.

Before I conclude, I again thank all here for indulging me, as this matters so much to Stroud constituents. I have two tiny little children who cause me chaos before I even get here, so this is a lovely, calm existence for me. I look at my baby and I think about the world she is growing up in, and the desire to ensure that we protect nature and the environment runs really deep. I know that many parents feel the same. I get really angry about all the abuse I get from eco-campaigners who say that I do not care. I do care. I care about this every day, but I make no apologies for taking a practical approach to net zero, as I always have done. I can see that the Prime Minister is trying to do the same thing in the face of great opposition.

I have always picked organisations and local businesses to work with, such as WWT Slimbridge, BorgWarner and PHINIA. I am about to ask about hydrogen combustion engines at Prime Minister’s questions. I work with those people to run campaigns that will make a difference, because they are the ones in which I think that I can carry influence. I do that rather than just virtue signalling or shouting into an echo chamber on Twitter. I desperately want to help businesses such as Bee Solar and Big Solar Co-op, who have smart people taking a smart approach to difficult issues.

The Government and local government should remove barriers that do not need to be there. My constituents and I will work on whatever is necessary to make that happen, but as I said, we cannot keep banging our heads against a brick wall. We are answerable to people who come to us saying, “We want these things in our houses, but it is just not happening.” I am very pleased to see the Minister who will respond to the debate in his place; he has so much experience from his career. I look forward to hearing what he and all our colleagues have to say.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on her diligence in obtaining this important debate about the nuts and bolts of how our country gets to a low-carbon renewable energy outcome.

I take it that, with the possible exception of one hon. Member present, there is pretty much a consensus that our country needs as much renewable power as possible, both offshore and onshore, so that we are on target for our climate goals. I also take it that we can organise our energy structures so that they mindful of how our landscape and community work while maximising the output of renewable and low-carbon energy in all circumstances. Clearly, decisions will have to be made about where things are sited, how they are sited and what the most productive use of land is under different circumstances, but those will be made within an overall view that we want to move forward on renewable energy as quickly as possible.

The hon. Member for Stroud identified the problems in a number of those areas, and I would say there are three: the small print, time, and connections. Those problems stand within the choices that we have to make, and resolving them does not undermine the principle that we must move forward on renewables on the basis of an acceptable use of the landscape, acceptable support from local communities, and an acceptable outcome in terms of the national stock of power and connections. We will have to do a lot of work across the landscape in different ways to ensure that we have not only the renewable plant, but the connections for that renewable plant, the planning arrangements for that renewable plant and all those things that work together strategically to enable us to get the best result for renewable energy across the country.

For example, the hon. Member for Stroud identified a number of things in our planning regulations that quite absurdly stand in the way of perfectly good schemes that everybody wants—the local community and so on. It seems to me that there is an overriding responsibility on Government to get that right. Planning regulations should not impede good schemes that are wanted and agreed just because of the small print. There is therefore a substantial job to be done by Government in actually going through those regulations to ensure that they presume in favour of renewable development wherever possible, with proper concern where there are exceptions, but are not written in such a way as to impede those perfectly good schemes.

By the way, in the most recent alleged amelioration by the Government of the problem of planning for onshore wind, it is claimed that they have pretty much come to terms with the development of onshore wind in their most recently announced changes to planning arrangements. They are no such thing in reality. The small print of those changes still effectively bans onshore wind from moving forward, because of the way that footnote 54, in particular, is to be written in national planning frameworks. Alongside the examples mentioned by the hon. Member for Stroud, that is an example of how the small print can have big effects on stalling, overthrowing or frustrating renewable and low-carbon development. It needs to be removed.

The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) made the point about just how much time is taken on offshore applications. Time is so important in not only getting these arrangements over the line, but ensuring that the investment happens in the first place. Someone faced with a 12-year process of getting their application sorted out, permissioned, thought about and given the go-ahead faces, among other things, a severe gap—a valley of death, as it were—between their application being progressed and the revenue from that application being arrived at. In many instances, those people will simply go away and not develop. Getting the time right, reducing the amount of time that the Secretary of State can take to make decisions and speeding up the process for renewables across the board are of vital importance. That is another thing that the Government can really have a hand in getting right.

The third question is on connections. We have increasing examples of the distortion of decision making on the siting of ground-mounted solar farms, because the developers of solar farms are faced with virtually no connectivity at distribution network operator level as far as their applications are concerned. They are therefore not necessarily looking for the best site for their solar farm in a particular area; they are looking for the small windows of remaining connectivity that might be possible for their solar farm to develop. They are looking for those permissions before, say, 2035. I have a direct case of that from some people I was talking to recently, who have done exactly that in their application for a solar farm. Unless we can quickly get the connectivity sorted out both offshore and onshore, planning schemes will increasingly be distorted. The Government can do a great deal on that. I hope the Minister will be able to comment on that this morning.

The hon. Member for Stroud has given us a good lesson on the detail and how we need to get the details right to bring the schemes forward.

[Siobhan Baillie]

I was hoping to hear from the shadow Minister, who is so diligent and always gets in the weeds of the details, which I say with the greatest respect, because he looks very carefully at issues, about his leader’s position on planning. The right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) says that he will override local views to get planning applications through—I appreciate he was talking about homes rather than renewables—but how does that work with local people’s concerns and what he says about issues with councils? There is a lot of confusion out there about Labour’s policy, which we know can change with the wind.

[Dr Whitehead]

I think that what is being referred to is entirely in the context of what I have been saying about the impediments that we have at the moment. It is well known that we have broad support—this has been mentioned in the Chamber today—for particular proposals and a deep, narrow objection among certain people. I am afraid the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) is in that category of people who are just fundamentally opposed to these things, and he has various techniques that he puts forward to underpin that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Siobhan Baillie]

I thank everybody for their contributions. In the examples of local projects in North Devon, Cornwall, Essex and Lincolnshire, the scale of things to do will make the Minister’s hair stand on end, but I am also very clear that this does not all lie at the Government’s door; local authorities can play a huge role in delivering these projects, being more transparent, responding to constituents and being the front door to getting things done. With the confusion that is reigning, we need some clarity and it probably needs to come from the Government and from people like the LGA. I thank everyone again and I thank you for your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered planning considerations for renewable energy providers.