Wind Farms: Protected Peatland

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered windfarm development on protected peatland.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. I am glad to be introducing this incredibly important debate, which I have personally secured. It is particularly timely because, right now, Brontë country—a delicate mosaic of precious peatland and an historic heritage landscape, straddling Haworth and Stanbury in the Worth valley in my constituency across to Hebden Bridge in the Calder valley—is under threat like never before. There is a proposal for a huge wind farm development, and I will spend my time in this debate stating exactly why we should oppose the disastrous scheme.

Before I begin, I put on record my thanks to the various local campaign groups that have been working tirelessly to oppose the Calderdale wind farm and get the proposals scrapped. There are too many to mention, but I particularly thank Lydia and Nick MacKinnon and Jenny Shepherd.

Today happens to be the 110-year anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë, author of several books and poems, most notably Jane Eyre. The works of Charlotte and her sisters, Emily and Anne, are world famous, as is the iconic moorland that inspired many of their stories. If approved, the Calderdale wind farm would see up to 34 200-metre-high wind turbines erected across Brontë country.

This moorland is not just a site of famous literary heritage; it is also the site of irreplaceable protected peatland. I have been firmly against these proposals ever since they were first brought forward in 2023, and I have been inundated with correspondence from my constituents and local campaign groups who agree that this scheme will be hugely detrimental to our heritage landscape and our precious protected peatland.

Before today’s debate, I wrote to the hon. Members for Halifax (Kate Dearden), for Shipley (Anna Dixon), for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn), for Pendle and Clitheroe (Jonathan Hinder) and for Burnley (Oliver Ryan), inviting them to speak in today’s debate, so that we could work on a cross-party basis to strongly oppose these development proposals. Like me, I am sure that they have been inundated with correspondence from constituents concerned about these proposals, so it is disappointing not to see all of them here today.

Before I outline in more detail my concerns about the Calderdale wind farm proposals, I want to be very clear that I am not against wind farm developments or renewable energy schemes. However, I am absolutely against wind farms being developed where they will have a huge impact on the environment, ecology, wildlife, heritage, flooding risk and the very carbon sequestration ability of our peat, which will be hugely negatively impacted.

It is with peat—and its carbon storage ability being severely impacted—that I will start. The peat in the south Pennine moors is generally considered to be around 9,000 years old; the mosaic of blanket bogs began forming thousands of years ago from sphagnum moss. For centuries, the peat has been absorbing the carbon emissions from the mills of our industrial past, our transport and our everyday modern life.

Peat is delicate and grows just a millimetre a year if we are lucky, and only when subject to a limited range of favourable environmental and climate conditions. The proposals of the Calderdale wind farm could cover approximately 2,300 hectares of protected peatland above Hebden Bridge and Haworth, and the impacts of disturbing such precious peatland will have disastrous consequences on the local area and beyond.

Peatland is a natural store of carbon, capturing and storing 26 times as much carbon as our forests in the UK. Almost all our UK peatlands have at least some blanket bog, with UK uplands containing around 15% of the blanket bog in the world. The Walshaw moor alone is made up of approximately 16,000 acres of it. Healthy peatlands will absorb and store carbon, and build carbon into the peat. However, if peatlands are damaged, which is unavoidable with huge infrastructure projects such as wind farms, it can release carbon back into the atmosphere, dramatically increasing carbon dioxide emissions. The amount of infrastructure required for the Calderdale wind farm is huge. It includes the foundations associated with each turbine, the complex road network that needs to be built across the peat so that each turbine can be fixed in place, the expansive base areas next to each turbine, the vast cabling routes that need to be buried underneath the peat, the man-made drainage cut-outs that need to be installed, the sub-stations, the weather monitoring and the fencing—I could go on. All of that will have a deeply damaging impact on our protected peatland.

As with any major infrastructure project, access routes will need to be created to the turbine sites, and those service roads will cut across blanket bog and seriously impact landscape hydrology. Long-established estate roads in uplands tend to avoid peatland because of the maintenance challenges, but wind farm roads simply cannot do that; they are constrained by the requirements of the turbine layout and the moorland topography. That is not just a short-term problem; once constructed, a wind farm road becomes a permanent feature of the landscape. Peat subsidence will continue indefinitely because of the need for our roads to be kept constantly dry and because of compression from the weight of roadway material. A very real example of that is the A5, which was built across peatland on the Welsh border nearly 300 years ago but continues to subside today.

I know that the developers and those supporting the Calderdale wind farm proposals like to say that the benefits of producing renewable energy outweigh the carbon loss caused by the development, but the justifications they have offered have been extremely poor. In fact, Professor Richard Lindsay, a world-leading expert on peatland ecosystems, who I spoke to just last week, has described those making this argument as

“clinging to the carbon calculator as a drowning man clings to a life belt”.

By that, he means that the system of measuring carbon storage impact is not fit for purpose. It simply does not consider all the influencing factors, or indeed the cumulative impact of onshore wind farm developments, the vast majority of which are north of the border in Scotland and in Wales.

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech and rightly highlighting the concerns about these developments. In my constituency in the Borders, we have wind farms, battery storage proposals and solar farms. As my hon. Friend said, developers talk at length about the supposed environmental benefits, but that is no more than greenwashing, because the wider negative impact these developments will have on the local environment where these developments are taking place is far greater than any benefit that might come from the developments proceeding.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He makes an excellent point: the developers have failed to ascertain that the positives of the project outweigh its negative impacts, including the impact on the ability of the peatland to sequester and store carbon. That is before even considering all the negative impacts on highways, the impacts of the infrastructure that has to be developed and the impact on local communities. The renewable energy scheme will be incredibly detrimental; the peatland will hold more carbon. That is why I am firmly opposed to the development.

Another huge risk with the development of wind farms on sites of protected peatland such as Walshaw moor is the impact on both water quality and flooding. Peatland is 95% to 98% water—it has the same percentage of solid content as a jellyfish. Disturbing it through the construction of wind turbines on Walshaw moor will increase flood risk and damage water quality in Calder Valley towns and surrounding communities. Studies have shown that putting any kind of hard infrastructure on peatland has a direct negative impact on how peat interacts with itself; it prevents peat bogs from absorbing rainwater, which ultimately increases flood risk downstream and increases the likelihood of serious slipping incidents.

Peatland also plays a key role in regulating water quality. Around 72% of the UK’s reservoirs are fed from peat, and over 28 million people consume water from peaty catchments. Degradation and disturbance of peat is often accompanied by increases in dissolved and particulate organic carbon loads, which increases the treatment costs required to make water drinkable.

Another additional environmental risk associated with the Calderdale wind farm proposal is the risk to local wildlife. Walshaw moor is home to a number of protected bird species, including the lapwing, golden plover, merlin, short-eared owl and the curlew—today, in fact, is World Curlew Day. Those species use Walshaw moor as breeding grounds, and organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds have warned that disturbing such populations with the installation of wind turbines will significantly damage overall numbers of the birds.

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that with nuclear power stations, for example, decommissioning costs are built into the cost-benefit analysis of any such projects, and yet that is not the case when wind farms are built in environmentally sensitive areas?

The right hon. Member makes an excellent point. He is absolutely right, because the decommissioning costs are not necessarily built into what the impact will be on our environment, our protected peat or our wildlife. I know that because the developers themselves say that once the site finishes its usage, parts of the development will not be removed—such as the piles, the infrastructure for the road, the foundations—but simply remain in situ.

Worse than that, however, should an additional wind farm come down the line, it will use the infrastructure that is already in place, but is likely to have to be expanded. A further real live concern is because when the application came before us, the initial proposal was for 65 wind turbines, although that has been reduced to 35 wind turbines now. That creates the real worry of it potentially being only phase 1 of a much bigger wind farm coming down the line. Therefore, once the precedent is set of an application being approved by the Government —it will be the Secretary of State who determines it—stage 2 will therefore come down the line. That deeply worries me.

I am grateful that, last week, I had the opportunity to speak with peat experts, Dr Andreas Heinemeyer, Professor Richard Lindsay, Dr Emma Hinchcliffe and Jessica Fìor-Berry, all of whom pointed to the complete lack of research and evidence about the impact of wind farm development on protected peatland. I therefore ask the Labour Government why the Minister is in favour of pushing through development on protected peatland such as Walshaw moor despite the hugely damaging impacts I have outlined in this speech.

The proposals for the Calderdale wind farm demonstrate a glaringly obvious hypocrisy that this Government show when it comes to protecting our protected, precious peatland. The Government were elected on a manifesto that committed to expanding nature-rich habitats such as peatlands. The Minister for Nature herself has repeatedly called our peatlands “this country’s Amazon rainforest”, so why do the Labour Government continue to support completely destroying them—when other options are available—given the scale of this development?

As the Member for Shipley and a neighbouring constituent, I want to make those listening aware that we have attended the debate and will shortly be giving our views on the proposals, as the hon. Member invited us to do, for which I thank him.

Perfect intervention there, but we have had an intervention from only one of the five neighbouring Labour Members of Parliament I invited to this debate, of which only two turned up. I wrote to all those Members of Parliament—crikey, it must have been about seven months ago—inviting them to join me in a cross-party consensus so that we could join forces in opposing this scheme. Despite the hon. Member for Shipley’s intervention, I am yet to hear that she is opposed to this scheme. I invite her, and the hon. Members for Halifax, for Calder Valley, for Pendle and Clitheroe and for Burnley, to join me in opposing this scheme.

Order. May I confirm that the hon. Member has informed the Members he mentioned that he was going to mention them in this debate?

Sir Alec, not only did I inform them today to remind them to come to this debate, I wrote to them last week inviting them to come to this debate and I wrote to them maybe six months ago asking them to join me. They are well aware that this debate is taking place. It is very disappointing that they did not turn up to stand up and speak on behalf of their constituents.

Renewable energy could be an essential part of our future, but not like this—not here, and not at the cost of everything the Brontë country represents. This scheme must be stopped.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship again, Sir Alec. I thank the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) for the invitation to join him in Westminster Hall today. It is always a pleasure for me to talk about the fantastic peatlands and moors in my wonderful constituency.

As we have heard, peatlands occupy about 12% of the UK land area, including many areas in my constituency: Baildon moor, Harden moor and parts of Rombalds moor. We have some wonderful upland landscapes. I recently walked up to Top Withens, which has been mentioned and has a precious place as the inspiration for “Wuthering Heights”. I took some American guests, who were very inspired by the cultural heritage in the Bradford district, which we all so enjoyed celebrating in 2025 when Bradford hosted the city of culture. I was excited to hear the first curlew of spring, one of the pleasures of walking in the upland moors, and see the lapwings doing their amazingly flamboyant mating dance.

As the hon. Member has rightly highlighted, peatlands are crucial in our fight against climate change. They store a whopping 3.2 billion tonnes of CO₂. They also reduce flood risk—something that particularly impacted constituents during the Boxing day floods over a decade ago—and support biodiversity. The Labour Government are acting to stop the decline in nature depletion.

However, as we have heard, both here in the UK and around the world our peatlands have been degraded and, according to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, are now estimated to be a net source of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. Stopping their degradation must be a really big priority. That is why I welcome steps that Bradford council has taken to scale up peatland restoration on the district’s moorlands. In 2023, some £200,000 of additional funding was committed to rewet areas of the moorland. If someone goes to walk there, they can see blocked drainage ditches and things called leaky dams, which slow the flow of water.

My hon. Friend is giving a powerful speech. She is absolutely right that the Government are committed to helping with the rewilding and restoration of our peatland. It is probably worth noting that that is done by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) was a DEFRA Minister for years, so it is somewhat of a surprise that he is a new convert to the environment.

These investments are critical, and it is pleasing that the Labour Government are taking nature actions so seriously. In addition to those I mentioned, there is also the planting of sphagnum moss—which is quite tricky to pronounce.

Bradford has recently published its climate action plan 2025-28, which outlines its comprehensive approach to working towards a low-carbon future. I also welcome steps taken by the Government at a national level with the environmental improvement plan, which was published just a few months ago. It says that we will—

“Restore approximately 280,000ha of peatland in England by 2050”.

The hon. Member seems to be dancing around the edges. This debate is on the matter of

“windfarm development on protected peatland”

but she has not mentioned anything to do with wind farms yet. I am keen to understand whether she is for or against the Calderdale wind farm.

I am just coming to that part of my speech. I will first turn to wind farms, and then I will come specifically to my views on the Calderdale wind farm, which lies largely outside of my constituency.

As well as restoring peatlands, which I have dwelled on in the first part of my speech, another key aspect of the comprehensive climate plan is ensuring that we invest in renewable energy. I am proud that this Government have pledged to make the UK a clean energy superpower, and as part of that have set up Great British Energy to produce cheaper and cleaner power for our country.

I will briefly make a political point, as the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley also did, to remind him that his party ended a lot of the support for solar power and blocked the expansion of onshore wind. In its dying days, it seemed to attempt to create some sort of green wedge between the parties, and broke what had been a long-held consensus among at least the main political parties that we needed to tackle climate change. What I have heard from him—I will give my position shortly—is that he is opposed to the development, but he has pledged his support for clean energy, which seems at odds with some Members of his party.

I shall now discuss Calderdale wind farm. I would not say it was the most overwhelming issue in my postbag, but 22 constituents have contacted me about the proposals. They rightly believe that protected peatland should be protected. I agree with them, and I think that the Labour Government, and I hope the Minister, will give the same assurance. I believe that is why there has been a recent announcement that large infrastructure must also be covered by a biodiversity net gain. I hope the Minister will explain how that would apply to this particular project, if it were to go ahead, and how we would ensure that the peat was protected.

I urge the Government to listen to the arguments made in this debate. There could clearly be major negative impacts on our precious peatlands in this area of Yorkshire, and I ask that the Government look carefully and reconsider the proposals. I agree with the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley that it would be beneficial to extend the statutory period of consultation to allow all significant organisations that wish to feed into it to have their say. I support—as I know the Labour Government do—the protection of our special peatlands. We must tackle climate crisis, but at a local level we must balance our need to drive forward clean energy with the detrimental potential impact.