16:30 James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)

Let me divert any suggestion that may arise during the debate that I am somehow anti-solar, anti-renewable or anti-environmentalist. On the contrary, I suspect that everyone in the Chamber is a passionate environmentalist. I went to the first COP, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, as a special adviser, and I have been on the Environmental Audit Committee ever since. I am passionate about the north and south poles, which I have visited often, and where we can see the effect of climate change, and in every way I would consider myself to be an environmentalist. I would not want my credentials to be lessened by my remarks this afternoon, and I am sure other right hon. and hon. Members around the room feel the same.

I am proud of the fact that we have a proud environmental record in Wiltshire. We declared a climate change emergency in February 2019, and we plan to make the county carbon-neutral by 2030. Renewables play an extremely important part in that, and I am proud of the contribution that we have already made with regards to solar. For example, at the former RAF Lyneham in my constituency, we have a 250 acre solar farm with 269,000 solar panels, providing 69.8 MW —enough energy to power 10,000 homes as well as the base itself. That is not a bad way to do it, but the point is that it is entirely invisible. It is on the base, it is on former Army land, it is within the wire and it is entirely invisible to anybody nearby. Equally, RAF Wroughton, which is nearby, has 150,000 solar panels on 170 acres. A number of similar ex-military sites are invisible to the passer-by and are making a huge contribution to renewable energy. By contrast, at Minety in my constituency, planners recently agreed to a solar farm with 166,000 panels on 271 acres of agricultural land despite massive local opposition, which seems to go against what is said in the national planning policy framework. I will come back to that in a second.

I testify to my hon. Friend’s environmental credentials. He wrote the excellent book “Poles Apart”, which I have read, about the Arctic circle—in fact, I visited the North Pole with him some years ago. I completely agree that we need solar farms and sustainable energy and that we need to diversify our energy sources, but I also agree that we need to ensure that planning does not override the current use of agricultural land, nature reserves and sites of special scientific interest, which often happens with solar farms. I therefore agree that any review of the planning guidance needs to ensure that those other factors are fully taken into account, rather than being overridden by solar farms on their own.

This is not just happening in the west country; we are getting it in Hertfordshire. We have a number of applications for quite substantial areas of productive farmland. We are talking about 150 or 200 acres, and quite a few of these pieces of land are all in one area, which is causing a lot of concern. It is probably right, when we look at revising the planning framework, that we look at the balance between productive agricultural land and sustainable energy, because both are important. I will just mention Protect the Pelhams and the Bygrave Action Group, which asked me to make that point.

Before I come back to the national planning policy framework, which must be central to this afternoon’s debate, I will touch briefly on battery storage solutions, which are springing up all over the place. They are absolutely hideous. There is a fire risk attached to them, and they do not make a single contribution towards renewables. All they do is store electricity that has been produced at a cheap time, when there is low demand overnight, instead of at an expensive time, such as during the day. In other words, they increase the electricity producer’s profits but do not reduce the amount of electricity used, even slightly. They do not increase the amount of renewable energy produced; they are merely a convenience for the developers. They are a hideous new development. Technology will soon overtake them, and we will be left with hundreds of acres of countryside with these vast industrial sites on them. They will then be redundant and the planners will turn around and say, “They are brownfield sites. Let’s put houses or factories on them”—on what was, until recently, farmland.

The hon. Gentleman is raising an important issue. In my constituency, one farmer diversified by putting in a solar farm—one that is acceptable because, as the hon. Gentleman said, it is not obtrusive and it is not seen. After substantial consultation, the local community agreed with it as well. As we look ahead to the need for green energy, and as we look to the war in Ukraine, it is clear that the demands on highly productive land will be greater than ever. Does there come a time when solar farms and battery installations have to take a backseat to food production?

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16:58 Virginia Crosbie (Ynys Môn) (Con)

In 2019, 27% of energy in Wales came from renewables, of which solar formed a very small proportion. In recent months we have all felt the problems caused by being dependent on other countries for our energy. Like the Welsh Government, we are fully behind the move to net zero, and we recognise that renewables must form part of our future energy strategy.

I hope that the Minister will take on board the risk that, in the rush to achieve net zero, however laudable, we may sacrifice vast areas of agricultural land, and hence our food security, to solar panels, which do not offer the dependable, large-scale solution we need to the energy crisis.

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17:02 Matt Rodda (Labour)

I am very much in favour of a sensible approach to this issue that balances the importance of energy security and tackling the climate emergency with not creating eyesores in the countryside. I am proud of our record in my area of central Berkshire. I represent an urban seat, but we have a strong tradition of solar power from our borough council and neighbouring local authorities, and in land nearby. Much of it is on the roofs of buildings and on brownfield land. I want to get across the positive message about using those types of land. There is a large amount of brownfield land in southern England, although I appreciate the points made by colleagues from slightly further west. There is also the issue of developers looking for land in the south, where sunlight is slightly more plentiful.

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17:10 Mike Amesbury (Labour)

The justified concerns about the local impact of solar farms must be weighed against our inescapable need to build renewable energy, and lots of it, over the coming years in order to meet our net zero target by 2050. Renewable energy, including solar energy, must be built, and it must be built somewhere. It is always easy for someone to say that they are in favour of renewable energy in principle; it is much harder to say that they are in favour of renewable energy in a specific location. Members from across the Chamber have made very considered speeches about the circumstances in which we should build solar farms, and I agree that we need to be clear about the need for a strategic approach, so that we can understand exactly what we need and where it needs to go. However, it certainly needs to go somewhere, and that should be our starting point.

With the costs of fossil fuels soaring, wind and solar power are the keys to bringing down costs for customers, ensuring energy security in the face of the Ukrainian war and fighting climate change, yet the Government are intentionally limiting access to the cheapest, quickest and cleanest forms of new power by stopping the production of enough onshore wind and solar energy to power 3 million homes. Members have today made some great suggestions regarding where that energy capacity should be built. Instead, we have a Chancellor who has just handed a £1.9 billion tax break to producers of oil and gas that could pump nearly 900 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. Our climate and our constituents will pay the price for the Government doing the unthinkable and backing the fossil fuel industry, despite claiming to have the admirable target of reaching net zero by 2050. What assurances can the Minister give that the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s apparent green light for the fossil fuel industry will be revisited with a sense of urgency and with funding redirected to renewables, developed in the right places? Why not incentivise, as people have said? We simply cannot reach the kinds of targets that we need to be reaching by limiting ourselves to small-scale urban solar farms. That will involve larger-scale projects over the 50 MW rate that at the moment qualifies a proposal as a nationally significant infrastructure project.

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17:17 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Eddie Hughes)

In our net zero strategy and British energy security strategy, the Government committed to securing and fully decarbonising the UK’s electricity supply. Crucially, we are considering how the planning system can further support our commitment to reaching net zero. The British energy security strategy sets out our plans to consult on some specific changes to the planning system to support delivery of renewable infrastructure, including solar farms. That energy strategy sets a clear ambition for a fivefold increase in deployment of the UK’s solar capacity, up to 70 GW, by 2035. That obviously means shifting up a gear in terms of deployment, but what it categorically does not mean is seizing large swathes of countryside and turning them into industrial solar farms and storage units. Yes, large-scale ground-mounted farms will be needed, but smaller commercial and domestic rooftop projects will be just as essential.

I will respond to some of the points made in the debate. On toughening up planning regulations in the NPPF to make sure that ground-mounted solar panels are not blighting the countryside, I can tell my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire that we will consult on amending planning rules in England to strengthen policy in favour of solar development on non-protected land. We intend to do this while making sure that local communities continue to have a real say over applications, with all the existing environmental protections remaining in place, and we will publish the consultation in due course. We are also committed to delivering on the commitments we made in the net zero strategy to review national planning policy, to make sure it contributes to climate change mitigation and adaption as fully as possible.

Given that we need to achieve a fivefold increase in solar generation, we are going to have great difficulty in finding places to put that in a way that does not compromise people’s enjoyment of the countryside, at least in some small way. We need to find a way through this that means we achieve our net zero objective while not upsetting too many Members of this House or the public more generally.

Finally, it is good to see the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) at the Dispatch Box again. The war in Ukraine has told us that we need to maximise our energy security by making sure that we have access to oil, because that is clearly how we generate lots of our electricity, while continuing our commitment to a transition to net zero by doing things such as scaling up our solar power production dramatically.

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