Renewable Energy Providers: Planning Considerations

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.

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?

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,

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.

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.

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.

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?

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms McDonagh. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on introducing this important subject with such knowledge. She will not be surprised to hear that I too face a lot of abuse online, but for sometimes taking the opposite position. We on the Opposition Benches are concerned that what the Government call a pragmatic approach to net zero means further delay, which is the one thing we cannot afford.

Net zero should be non-negotiable. At a time when we should be strengthening our climate commitments, it is folly to weaken them. The UK has done well to lead the way on climate change, but recently this Government sadly seem to have given up on the country’s leadership position. How unnecessary! Renewables are the cheapest form of energy and would secure our energy supply. Moving rapidly towards renewables is central to reaching net zero by 2050, and will help to limit the devastating impacts of climate change. The Climate Change Committee has said that we are not moving fast enough towards renewables. Offshore and onshore wind development has been slow, and solar is particularly off-track. It is just not good enough.

The proportion of renewable projects being delayed is on the rise. Grid capacity, which the hon. Member for Stroud mentioned, is the obvious issue. However, the planning process must also be improved. My region of the south-west built the UK’s first transmission-connected solar farm. Despite its success, the developers said that planning was one of the most significant hurdles to delivering renewable energy at scale. Speeding up the planning process is vital; it takes up to five years to gain approval for an offshore wind farm after the application has been submitted to the planning system. We do not have the time for that in this race to net zero.

Resourcing needs to improve. The Planning Inspectorate and statutory consultees do not have enough resources to carry out timely and accurate reviews. It is all well and good saying that there is a debate, and ping-pong about what or who is responsible—is it the national planning framework, or is it local planners? However, if we do not have enough local planners to make these decisions, all these things get desperately delayed. Local government needs more resources and funding to make sure that planning decisions are made in a timely manner; otherwise, there are delayed projects, and delayed progress towards net zero.

On a point of clarity, is the hon. Lady saying that local people should have more say, and local communities should be more empowered, or that they should have less say, and that there should be more direction from the centre? I could not quite understand the point she was making.

I am happy that the right hon. Gentleman made that intervention, and happy to clarify for him. We Liberal Democrats believe passionately in local decision making, so that is obviously what needs to be strengthened, but local decision making cannot happen if we do not have the resources in our planning departments.

We have also been talking about consultation. I was a councillor for ten years, and was always appalled at how poor consultation was, mainly because councils had statutory obligations to consult only in a very small area. Why do we not widen that out, particularly in rural areas? If the obligation is just a matter of distance, then 10 people will be consulted, and awareness of big planning applications will spread only through local knowledge, rather than as a result of the council approaching people directly. Why do councils not do that? Because they do not have the money. If they do not have the statutory obligation to consult widely, they will consult only a small number of people. If we want to strengthen local decision making, that must change. I absolutely believe in local decision making, and if a planning decision does become a national decision—if an inspectorate comes in—then, of course, we do not want delays there either, because delays are unacceptable either way. That applies to any planning decision, by the way, not just renewable planning.

The Government must also do more to remove the barriers to renewable energy. Renewables developers still face a planning system that is stacked against onshore wind. It is treated differently from every other energy source or infrastructure project. If that persists, we will not get the new onshore wind investment we need to rapidly cut bills and boost energy security. Onshore wind farms are actually popular: 74% of voters are supportive of onshore wind, and 76% of people would support a renewable energy project in their area. That support holds strong in places that already have an onshore wind farm; 72% of people who live within five miles of one support building more. That addresses a problem that we have: people are anxious about things that they do not know, and a lot of political hay can be made with that, but when people actually have a wind farm development nearby, they support it. That is not surprising: communities benefit massively from onshore wind, both directly—for example, from developers, through bill reductions—and indirectly, through the wider socioeconomic benefits that such investment can bring.

I agree with much of what the hon. Lady says, but when it comes to onshore wind, she must surely acknowledge that consultation often results in opposition. The problem with onshore wind is that too many of the applications are for areas of outstanding natural beauty or beautiful rural areas, rather than, say, docks or industrial estates. Does the hon. Lady think the focus should be on placing onshore wind farms in more suitable locations?

I thank the hon. Member for the intervention. A long time ago, when I was a councillor, a big wind farm was built in my ward. I remember well the local objections to it; people said, “Oh, the beautiful, natural environment of our hills!” The natural environment of the hills had been destroyed decades or centuries ago. There were no trees any more. Local people come forward and talk about our beautiful natural environment, but the natural environment had become like that, and wind farms are now becoming part of the landscape that we are creating for people. Once wind farms are there, people stop objecting to them; surveys are very clear on that.

Of course, it is clear that people are always worried about change. We are building something new and taking away something that was there, but if we are doing so for something that is so important, why can we not make the case that a wind turbine might be a much nicer thing to look at than, for example, a coal-fired power station, which we also need to put somewhere if we need energy? What we do as humans creates some disruption to our local environment, and it has done so forever, so what do we want? We need to get to net zero, build this infrastructure and build wind turbines, including in places where we can see them. As responsible politicians, it is up to us to make the case for that. We have no time to waste: it is a race to net zero, and it is difficult. Yes, some people do not like to look at wind farms.

So much for local decision making!

But this is something of which we can persuade people, and I believe in persuading local people. Yes, that sometimes takes time, but it is for us to do, because we have that persuading power and are in the position of influencing people. That is where we should be, rather than always being on the side of the nay-sayers. That is my honest position. I know that it is not easy; I have been there, too, in my time.

I commend the Liberal Democrats on Bath and North East Somerset Council, which has become the first council in England to adopt an energy-based net zero housing policy. That requires that all new major non-residential buildings must achieve net zero in operational energy. Research from the University of Bath indicates that the policy is likely to establish significant carbon savings in new buildings and reduce energy bills for occupants. Again, did my local council sometimes have difficulty persuading people? Yes, it did, but our local election results show persuasively that where we go out and make the case, we win—even as local councillors. Let us ensure that we persuade people and take them with us. I absolutely believe in that, but I also passionately believe that it is possible to take people with us if we confront people with the alternatives.

Unfortunately, Government funding cuts have forced many local authorities to make sacrifices on climate change policy, as climate change does not come under their statutory duties. That must change. Planning legislation must be bound to our climate change legislation, so that climate change takes greater weight in planning decisions. A major reason why renewable projects are waiting up to 15 years to connect to the grid is that the planning approval process is not adequately focused on the urgency of delivering net zero. The Royal Town Planning Institute argues that nothing should be planned unless the idea has first been demonstrated to be fit for net zero. The Government should certainly consider the institute’s proposals further.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on securing this important debate.

I have a specific project that I wish to speak about today. I established and chair the all-party parliamentary group for the Celtic sea, and I have championed floating offshore wind, or FLOW, projects across the Celtic sea, working collaboratively with developers, ports, MPs and associated businesses right around the Devon, Cornwall and south Wales coast. I therefore find myself in a particularly difficult position, as are my constituents, on the proposed White Cross wind farm in my North Devon constituency. This project is 80 MW, so it is only a demonstrator project, and it has secured a distribution-level grid connection at Yelland. Given its scale, it has avoided being a national infrastructure project, and decisions about its development now lie with the Marine Management Organisation, which is under the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the local planning authority.

The local community is hugely supportive of FLOW. Although there are some environmental concerns about the six proposed turbines, it is the cable corridor that is proving highly controversial. I have been expressing my concerns about the proposed cable route ever since the project came to light. The route submitted to the planning authority involves tunnelling through several miles of sand dunes, a large seaside car park, holiday chalets, a golf course and possibly a world war two munitions dump, and it will take several years to construct. The quickest route to the plug-in point at Yelland is across Crow Point, a very active sand system and highly designated sand dune complex. Although that route is potentially more environmentally contested, it would cause far less damage to hospitality businesses in a constituency that is dependent on its tourism economy. No one has been able to explain to me who decided on the cable corridor, and both the MMO and the local authority advise that they have no influence and cannot comment on whether a better corridor might exist.

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech, and I agree with a lot of what she is saying. As she is talking about compensation, will she explain what compensation would be adequate?

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. Please do not think that this is a nimby issue. North Devon is home to the Fullabrook wind farm, which, when it was built, was the largest onshore wind farm in the country, at 66 MW. The project established Fullabrook CIC—community interest company—which was set up with £1 million from the then owners of the wind farm. It has now given over £1.58 million for community projects and receives £100,000 per annum from the current owners. I find it bewildering that White Cross has seemingly made no offer of community involvement. Indeed, its only offer is to decimate huge sections of coastline for its own financial gain.

I am gravely concerned that White Cross is not acting in any way appropriately with this development, and is taking advantage of the planning system, which it has chosen to use. I strongly believe that the entire Celtic sea FLOW project should be considered as one national infrastructure project. That would enable proper strategic planning and ensure that we hit our offshore wind targets, and that communities are included in decisions and appropriately recompensed for hosting infrastructure.

It is increasingly possible that the development will undermine all the support for FLOW that has been generated along this coastline. Hundreds of objections have been lodged, and further meetings are planned by local parishes in the coming weeks. It seems that the developers have carte blanche. As someone who is hugely supportive of the renewable opportunities ahead of us—as is my constituency—I ask that steps are taken to find a way through this cross-departmental maze to have this development withdrawn in its current form; that a better plan for the cabling is devised; that the Yelland socket is optimised, if used; and that the community across North Devon are properly consulted and recompensed for hosting this infrastructure.

With energy security so critical, alongside reaching net zero, surely we can devise a better way to install just six wind turbines, so that we can progress more quickly with these crucial infrastructure projects, with community support and transparency.