In a new series, CapX is celebrating the way our planning system tries its very best to save the country from affordable housing or decent infrastructure. This week, the Green Party’s confusing relationship with solar energy…
Where are we off to this week? Rutland.
Oh goodie, as a creepily obsessive fan of the work of Eric Idle, I’ve always wanted to go there. Also Derbyshire.
Hang on, what? And Sussex. And Suffolk, actually! This one’s a bit of a national theme, to be honest.
This entire column’s a bit of a national theme. Yes but this one’s a bit more specific a national theme: councillors from the Green Party of England & Wales who’ve taken it upon themselves to protect their local environment from the horrific industrial scourge of – wait for it, you’ll like this – solar panels.
Oh, you have got to be – You’d think, wouldn’t you? And yet.
Take Rutland councillor Rick Wilson. When he narrowly won the Ryhall & Casterton by-election in March 2022, he credited his victory to his opposition to two things. One, inevitably, was a plan to build more homes (650 of them, but that sort of NIMBYism is barely worth even noting any more). The other was the Mallard Pass Solar Farm, which will cover 4.2km2 of agricultural land immediately next to the East Coast Mainline.
This, one might think, sounds like a pretty good place to put a facility which will generate clean and renewable energy, but Wilson – who is, let’s remember, a Green – told Lincolnshire Online that while ‘we do need renewable energy… there are other green initiatives we can pursue and there are more suitable locations’. The Mallard Pass Action Group, incidentally, has a brilliantly pithy slogan: ‘YES to solar, NO to Mallard Pass’. To put that another way: yes to building things, no to doing it in my backyard.
And this happens a lot, does it? With unnerving frequency – so much so that last June the BBC did a whole piece looking at why.
In 2023, 25-year-old Frank Adlington-Stringer became the first Green to be elected to North East Derbyshire District Council. Two years earlier, he’d written an article explaining that, while he supports solar farms in principle, he objects to building them in his area in practice. His argument was that, ‘we shouldn’t be exchanging green energy for green spaces’, a stance which I’m sure will have global warming retreating in terror any day now.
In doing this, he was echoing the local Green Party’s recent campaign against solar panels in Hastings Country Park. This was not, as Julia Hilton, also later elected councillor, reassured us, a ‘Nimby argument’ – it was merely that this particular site was ‘not compatible with a solar farm, which would industrialise this very precious landscape habitat’.
The precious landscape habitat being? Fields.
Have all these people got confused and assumed the word ‘green’ just means ‘grass’? For what it’s worth – it’s not worth much – the national party still claims to be very much in favour of solar energy. It just reckons that three-quarters of it should be on roofs, not fields (which is a shame because experts reckon the absolute maximum capacity of said roofs is about half our national need). It also thinks that every application should be considered on its merits.
The people best placed to judge those merits being…? Green candidates trying to win elections. Andrew Stringer, a Green councillor in Suffolk who last year sided with local Tories against building yet more solar farms, has said his party is happy to ’embrace’ opposing its own policy nationally if it doesn’t make sense locally. That raises questions about why exactly the Greens even bother having national policy, but ‘it’s called democracy’, reckons Stringer, so.
At least it’s consistent with the party’s HS2 policy. Yep. And this, let’s call it inconsistency, seems likely to become worse. As the Greens win more seats in rural Tory heartlands, far from their traditional urban foothold, the party’s at risk of looking increasingly like the political wing of the CPRE.
You’ve run through quite a lot of material for a single column here. State of my inbox, trust me, it’s not gonna be a problem.
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