Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 11 June 2025 to Question 56079 on Agriculture: Land Use, what assessment he has made of the accuracy of the statistic that 50% of land with solar panels on is used for agricultural production.

The statistics are estimates from the annual Defra June Survey of Agriculture and Horticulture, a representative large scale sample survey of Defra registered farms* from across the country. Indications of accuracy in the estimates of the area of land with solar panels used/not used for agricultural production are provided below and in the published dataset https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/agricultural-land-use-in-england.

The Relative Standard Error (RSE) is a measure of the variation in the data, expressed as a percentage of the estimated total. Low RSE’s indicate greater reliability in the figures. The 95% confidence interval indicates the likely range of the exact figure. The standard errors which underpin both the RSE’s and the 95% confidence intervals only give an indication of the sampling error and do not take into account any other sources of survey error such as non-response bias or data entry errors.

*Data only covers holdings which are registered with the Rural Payments Agency for payments or livestock purposes and have significant levels of farming activity. Holdings are only included if they have more than five hectares of agricultural land, one hectare of orchards, 0.5 hectares of vegetables or 0.1 hectares of protected crops, or more than 10 cows, 50 pigs, 20 sheep, 20 goats or 1,000 poultry.