The newly-appointed Energy Secretary – taking up a former post he had in the last Labour Government, moved quickly to ‘unblock’ a trio of solar farm developments.
One of those was the Sunnica Solar Farm on the Suffolk/Cambridgeshire border. This was a controversial decision given the scale of the proposals as well as the location and land being used – and hotly contested by local politicians. I wrote about how ministers needed to update their planning policies on solar farms urgently in March 2022. They didn’t.
Ministers had the chance to reject the application. But as the BBC reported in April 2024, ministers delayed their decision for the fourth time. Therefore the Conservatives – now in opposition – don’t get to complain about the decision made by Labour’s Energy Secretary when the recommendation from civil servants was ***to reject the planning application***. Remember this is ministers acting in a quasi-judicial function – not as party politicians. The Law restricts what ministers can and cannot consider.
Mr Miliband rejects the advice from civil servants and approves the application
You can read the Decision Letter here – all 76 pages of it
It is in such depth because the Minister has to demonstrate he has rational and reasonable grounds on which to overturn the recommendation from civil servants and the Planning Inspector who made the recommendation. This is because planning law gives a legal right to challenge the decision through judicial review proceedings. Again, what can/cannot be considered is set out in law, so expect this decision to be pored over in detail by planning experts.
“Will there be a party-political impact?”
Had Labour won the West Suffolk seat in the 2024 general election, Rebecca Denness (Ely councillor who I worked with 20 years ago during my civil service days) would have had her work cut out explaining that to constituents. She came within 4,000 votes of the Tories – in a safe-as-military-fortresses seat that in 2019 gave the disgraced ex-Health Secretary of over 22,000. Theresa May’s former special adviser now holds the seat. The other seat covered by the solar farm proposal is the new Ely and East Cambs seat where constituents turfed out the former Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer by just 495 votes. Every vote counts. It will be interesting how the new Lib Dem MP Charlotte Cane – an experienced local councillor, along with her West Suffolk counterpart next door, will work together in response to the minister’s approval.
In a wider political strategy sense, I can see why the minister approved the development. Labour clearly made detailed plans a long time in advance – including asking civil servants at the pre-election talks what decisions were likely to come across their desks early on. Given his extensive public policy background before becoming an MP and then Minister, I’d have been astonished if Mr Miliband didn’t do any background reading on the solar farms prior to taking office. The detail that the Decision Notice goes into indicates they expect a legal challenge and have gone into sufficient depth to contest any points of contention up front. Which is why from a policy perspective it’s an interesting document. It’s not every day that a minister goes against the advice of their civil servants in a quasi-judicial function, and Mr Miliband will also be expecting to make a statement to Parliament as a result.
In Parliament, Mr Miliband will be able to engage in the party-political knock-about on the floor of the Commons.
Having set out the legal and policy issues in the decision notice, any party-political fire he comes under from opposition MPs – in particular Conservative MPs – will simply provoke the response that they dithered in government as the country descended downwards in the face of multiple crises. Thus enabling him to present the new government as a decisive one able to take ‘difficult decisions in the national interest’.
Such is the scale of the defeat and such is the infighting within the Conservative Party that it’ll take time for them to form anything like a coherent and effective opposition. In the meantime, Labour can set the terms of the 2029 general election in a similar way that the Conservatives did in 2010 for the 2015 general election. This is where I agree with what Pippa Heylings said on telly last week about the 72 Liberal Democrat MPs having to step up and be that much more high profile opposition (and fight for the media space too) while the Tories sort themselves out. Only as she mentioned, on issues like removing the child benefits cap they will be pushing Labour to go in the opposite direction of the Conservatives.
Coming back to solar panels and solar farms, it will be interesting to see what Labour propose in new planning policy statements (similar to what I wrote here) to see if they can persuade if not mandate the land owners of large car parks and warehouse buildings (or even land on the south side of major roads going east-west) to have solar panels installed so as to reduce the incentives for installing them on prime arable farmland. Which is one of the complaints about the Sunnica development. Part of the solution in my view is to have a large land audit to find out which plots of land might be suitable for which renewables – and make that data public alongside opening up the Land Registry so that the public and investigative journalists can find out who owns which plots of land. Not only will it make it easier for more suitable proposals to be put forward, but it deals with the transparency and corruption issues too.
Food for thought?
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