Solar Farms: Agricultural Land

I beg to move,

That this House has considered solar farms on agricultural land.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. We are addressing an issue of great importance: the proliferation of solar farms on our agricultural land.

As many hon. Members know, I have dedicated much of my life to raising awareness about our ecological and climate crises. I have met people who are set to lose their entire countries to rising seas. Let me be clear: nobody can doubt my commitment to strong action on climate change. However, there are many ways to skin the climate cat, and I do not believe that solar parks on the scale of Cottam, Cleve Hill, Longfield, Mallard Pass, Gate Burton, Sunnica and the proposed Lime Down, in my own constituency of South Cotswolds, are the best way forward.

I have received numerous messages from residents near the proposed site of Lime Down. Without exception, they are distressed about the proposal, and I share their concerns. They are not nimbys; they are thoughtful, environmentally conscious people, who, like me, agree that we need renewables but at the right size, in the right places and in the right ownership.

Like my hon. Friend, I am very keen on renewable energy. I am a Liberal Democrat, for heaven’s sake! However, I am also a pragmatist. In Washford, in my constituency, a massive solar farm is being built on particularly good agricultural land. Would my hon. Friend agree that we must be practical and put solar panels on commercial buildings and residential houses, rather than on farmland?

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I totally agree and will be coming to that point shortly.

I commend the hon. Lady for securing this debate. I suppose the issue is twofold. First, the farmers who sign up to solar farms are committed to a long-term lease, and that will impact the family inheritance tax potential. The second point comes in relation to using land better for food production, as it should be used, so that only land that is of a lesser quality, or rocky land, would be more suitable for solar farms. Does the hon. Lady agree that that is the way forward?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and I agree that that is the way forward.

Let us consider the facts. Our agricultural land is dwindling at an alarming rate. We are down to 14.8 million acres of arable land, the lowest amount since world war two, and we are losing nearly 100,000 acres annually. We already import nearly 60% of our food. Do we really want to increase that dependency on foreign supply chains?

My hon. Friend is being super generous and I am grateful to her. She makes excellent points. We obviously have means by which we can control how those things happen, through the environmental land management payment scheme and planning law. Would she agree that, through both of those streams, we should be able to ensure that food security is at least as important as energy security, and that we should not be using productive agricultural land for solar farms when they can be developed elsewhere? Westmorland and Furness Council, for example, has used disused land to provide a solar farm of its own on non-agricultural land.

I agree with my hon. Friend that we should be prioritising locations that do not impact on our ability to meet our food security needs.

The environmental benefits of solar farms are not as clearcut as some would have us believe. Yes, they produce clean energy, but at what cost? Large installations can alter local ecosystems, potentially contaminate soil and even increase local temperatures due to heat absorption by the dark panels—and let us not forget the human cost. Tenant farmers face eviction. Land values are skyrocketing, making it harder for new farmers to enter the industry, and we risk losing the very character of our rural communities that underpins local tourism and our national identity.

I agree with every word the hon. Lady has said so far. Does she agree with me that if we are to protect food security and give it equal billing with energy security and national security, not just solar installations are inappropriate, but the ancillary projects like those I am seeing in my constituency? For example, we have battery storage and National Grid coming along and saying it has to completely rebuild all of the substations on—guess what?—more agricultural land. This is a much bigger problem than just solar.

I absolutely agree with the hon. Member’s points. I am not against solar energy—far from it—but we need to be smart about how we implement it and all the associated infrastructure. Why not require all new homes to be fitted with solar panels, as proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) in his sunshine Bill? Why not use the vast roof spaces of warehouses, public buildings and car parks? These are sensible, minimally intrusive ways to contribute to our net zero goals.

I will confess that before being elected to this place, I spent 10 years in renewable energy finance. It is a common claim from certain activists and newspapers that we should put solar on commercial buildings. I do not disagree with that. The problem is the economics of it do not stand up from a finance perspective. Until the Government step in to guarantee a minimum amount of value for export, rooftop solar will never stack up. Neither will carport solar. That is why investors will always go for utility-scale. Does my hon. Friend agree that if we actually want to see a catalyst, if we want to see a change, if we want to see farmers growing crops and not solar panels, the Government need to step in and regulate the market?

My hon. Friend makes some very interesting points that I look forward to exploring further with him in the future. I agree that we need Government to intervene to adjust the incentives so that we can meet our energy needs with the lowest cost to our countryside.

Part of the barrier to public acceptance of large-scale solar farms comes from a need to see a joined-up approach and that we are balancing food security and energy security. What people want to see—for example, in my constituency with the large proposed Kingsway solar farm—is the much promised land use framework and the strategic spatial energy framework, so that they know where the 0.1% should go and that it is going in the right places, that there is a joined-up approach, and therefore that reasonable people can support it where necessary.

I am sure we are all waiting with bated breath for the long-awaited land use framework.

The National Farmers Union is well aware that British farmers host about 70% of this country’s solar generation capacity, but it is urging the Government to recognise that small-scale energy needs to be prioritised on brownfield sites and lower quality land first. Let us not forget about other nature-based solutions such as rewilding or planting 60 million trees per year. That would not only help to absorb carbon, but restore valuable habitats.

We do need to increase our use of renewables. However, it must be done sympathetically to the environment and should provide, as a priority, community energy to homes, schools and businesses. We have a real opportunity with the land use framework to define our national priorities for the long-term future, emphasising ways of multi-purposing land with ideas like intercropping, living roofs and rooftop solar.

We absolutely need cross-party consensus. The question of meeting future energy needs while not trashing the climate, our countryside or food production is too important to become a political football. The English countryside is currently at risk of being exploited for financial gain by profit-making companies—a corporate wolf dressed in green clothing. We must not allow that to continue unchecked.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) on securing this important debate and the number of interventions she received in such a short period of time reflects the strength of feeling.

Before I set out the Government’s approach, I reassure the hon. Lady and her constituents that we agree on most things in this space. We agree that we should be using renewables—whatever they are, wherever they are—in the best way possible. We agree that we need to look at our responsibilities in terms of the climate, agriculture, the countryside and food production. The Government take all those responsibilities very seriously and look them at very carefully. We agree that if we are building solar panels, for example, we should build on brownfield sites first. If we cannot, we should build on areas of lower-quality land first. We agree that food security is enormously important for this country. In the global conditions we find ourselves in, where there is more uncertainty—as we saw with the war in Ukraine and what followed with our energy prices—we need to be mindful of those things. When it comes to the principles, we agree.

I will set out the Government’s overall approach to our clean power mission, which might help to put the debate in context. We, like the hon. Member for South Cotswolds, have been clear from the start that the only way to tackle climate change, secure our energy supply, bring down bills and drive economic growth is through clean energy. The rapid deployment of clean energy infrastructure is essential for our future security and economy.

Is it not the case that the Government are just plumping for the technology that is available right now, in the form of thousands of acres of solar, when we need 2,000 acres of solar panels to produce enough electricity for just 50,000 homes on current usage? A small modular reactor needs just two football pitches for 1 million homes. As I have said many times, why on earth are the Government messing about with solar given its impacts on food security, which the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) mentioned?

The previous Government messed around with solar quite a lot—we are building on what the previous Government did, up to a point. The answer is to look at all the technologies that are available to us. SMRs are enormously attractive in lots of different ways, and lots of colleagues have been talking to us about them. As the hon. Gentleman knows, there is a process for the development of SMRs. We need all the tools in our armoury and we need to make sure we are using the most modern technology available. He makes a fair point on that front.

Sustainable power generated here in Britain will reduce our contribution to the damaging effects of climate change and our dependence on the volatile global fossil fuel market. It is already creating thousands of highly skilled jobs and will continue to do so. Instead of delaying the inevitable, we have set ourselves a target to push to clean power by 2030. The clean power action plan, published last month, sets out how we will get there, including the likely technology mix required. It is clear that solar will play a major role.