Energy Security and Net Zero Committee
Oral evidence: A flexible Grid for the future, HC 113
Wednesday 29 November 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 29 November 2023.
Members present: Angus Brendan MacNeil (Chair); Vicky Ford; Mark Pawsey; Lloyd Russell-Moyle; Mick Whitley.
Questions 122 - 221
Witnesses
I: Estelle Dehon KC, Barrister in environment and planning, Cornerstone Barristers; Robbie Owen, Board Secretary and Director, National Infrastructure Planning Association; Julia Prescot, Deputy Chair, National Infrastructure Commission.
II: Fiona Gilmore, Founder, Suffolk Energy Action Solutions; Justin Johnson, Development Manager, Rutland County Council; Alan Law, Deputy Chief Executive, Natural England; Jo Wall, Senior Strategy Director, Local Partnerships.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Estelle Dehon, Robbie Owen and Julia Prescot.
Q122 Chair: Good morning and welcome to the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee. This is our second session on the planning system. We have two panels today. The first panel are already assembled in front of us here. I will let you introduce yourselves, as ever, by name, rank or serial number, as you choose.
Estelle Dehon: Good morning. My name is Estelle Dehon, King’s Counsel. I am a public law barrister specialising in environment, climate and planning with Cornerstone Barristers.
Robbie Owen: Good morning. My name is Robbie Owen. I am a planning lawyer by profession and also a board director and the secretary of NIPA, which is the National Infrastructure Planning Association.
Julia Prescot: Good morning. I am Julia Prescot. I am deputy chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, the independent executive agency of the Treasury set up to advise Government on long-term strategic infrastructure policy. I am also co-founder of a global infrastructure fund, Meridiam, and the chair of NeuConnect, which is the new 1.4 gigawatt interconnection between the UK and Germany, which we are currently constructing.
Q123 Chair: Thank you all for being here this morning. Julia Prescot, can I ask your thoughts on the Government’s response and the idea of not reviewing every five years the National Infrastructure Commission’s planning study and the new set of energy policy statements?
Julia Prescot: We certainly welcome the update of the NPSs. It has been very clear that one of the areas we have suffered from, in terms of delays on planning, has been the rather—can I put it this way?—historical status of some of these NPSs. That has meant that the Planning Inspectorate has acted as an arbiter rather than an inquisitor, as was originally designed under the 2008 Planning Act. As a result of that, we hope now that, once these NPSs are designated, which I understand is happening next year, we can move forward with clearer direction.
From the NIC’s perspective, we had a number of areas that we felt could be updated in relation to the planning system. We were looking for information on a new data platform. We were looking at an effective and consistent approach to address the impact of infrastructure on the natural and built environment. We were supportive of the use of spatial planning. We were looking at the tangible direct benefits to local communities for hosting national infrastructure in the form of proximity-based payments. We were looking at the statutory requirements that NPSs were updated every five years and that there should be a co-ordination body at the heart of Government.
It was quite a menu. Much of it was covered. I am happy to comment on the areas that may not have been covered as well as they could have been. Unless we get the whole NPS system going at a better stage, consumers are suffering a cost in terms of lack of access to fossil fuels—sorry, I mean lack of access to green energy rather than fossil fuels; we have too many fossil fuels at the moment. We expect to put their bills down from around £2,200 to £1,400 over the next 10 years.
Also, there are the considerable constraint payments that are being made at the moment. They are £600 million to £1 billion a year, possibly going up to about £3 billion in five years’ time. We see it as a really positive thing that these NPSs have now been updated, but we are looking forward to their speedy designation.
Q124 Chair: I have two brief points. You mentioned constraint payments. I feel that, once the public or the media gets a full grip and understanding of what is going on, that is probably a brewing scandal. There is the other point on the energy costs. When we still have, say, gas or something expensive in the mix, when the last megawatt or gigawatt dictates the price, will prices really come down?
Julia Prescot: I would not like to pre-empt any of the discussions that are taking place in connection with REMA at the moment, but there is the expectation of a somewhat different approach to looking at that last pound, as it were, going forward into the future, plus the fact that the marginal cost of green energy, as far as the consumer is concerned, is extraordinarily low. You are talking about maintenance over time and the amortisation of the initial asset construction cost.
Q125 Chair: How long will the constraint payments be tolerated, do you think? Basically, it is the money for not generating that you mentioned, £600 million to £900 million, which looks to rise on current projections.
Julia Prescot: It is something that is in the system at the moment. Because of the way the system is structured, it is not something that is very easy to take out. If we can get more transmission lines on to the system, and therefore carrying green energy, we can look to try to reduce those constraint payments.
Q126 Chair: To rewind a little bit, would the review every five years be a better approach? Should the Government have accepted that?
Estelle Dehon: Yes. From my perspective, it would have been better had that been fully accepted, so accepted and backed by quite a strong obligation, not necessarily a full legal obligation but a very strong commitment to five-yearly reviews. The technology in this area is moving extraordinarily quickly.
Q127 Chair: That is a good argument for having reviews.
Estelle Dehon: That is one of the strongest reasons for having reviews. Also, the extent to which we are capable of swiftly fixing some of the difficulties will inform what planning policy needs to do going forward. If we do well on fixing some of the transmission difficulties and getting more grid capacity, policy can shift to other areas. If we are doing poorly, it needs to change and change more quickly. Both those things require five-yearly reviews.
Robbie Owen: I would agree with that. It is critically important that we do not get ourselves into the position we are now in again. There is no doubt that ageing national policy statements across the whole energy sector have contributed to a really significant increase in judicial reviews of decisions taken with reference to out-of-date policy. Not only do we need to get the new suite of energy NPSs designated very early next year, but Government need to come forward. They have said that they will look at this off the back of the NIC’s report and previous submissions that NIPA have made, and come to a view later next year.
I am also reminded that your own Committee made a recommendation in February of last year, in line with what NIPA had been suggesting, that Government ought to consider an overarching NPS with technical annexes that were easier to update. The key issue here is that there are some 17 or so national policy statements across the whole nationally significant infrastructure piece, so more than just energy. It has been demonstrated that the system is not capable of updating them every five years.
It was always the intention, when the Planning Act came in in 2008, that they would be updated every five years. That is what the White Paper said, but it has not been achieved. Therefore, the system needs to be more agile. Government need to come up with a better way of doing it. Personally, I would see sense in a five-yearly review being linked to the five-yearly national infrastructure strategy, which we had in 2020. We are told to expect one again in 2025, I believe. There is a logic in the NPSs being updated each time we have a new strategy, so that one tracks the other.
Q128 Chair: I think that that would have been the predecessor Committee, the BEIS Committee, before the Government reorganisation, but thanks for raising that point.
I have a final brief point for you all. I know that this is an area of competing interests, but should we be concerned that the national strategic planning of generation and transmission infrastructure leaves little scope for communities to influence projects in their areas? I can feel that the answer here can be a bit like the economist to Harry Truman: “on one hand or the other”, depending which way you want to give emphasis.
Robbie Owen: My view is that, for those aspects of infrastructure for transmission and generation that go through the NSIPs regime, there is a very good opportunity for communities to influence the infrastructure. There is a six-month examination process run by the Planning Inspectorate. Where we really need to make a step change across, again, not just energy but all sectors of infrastructure, is to have a proper system for devising and taking into account in planning decisions community benefit. This is one of the recommendations that the NIC came up with in April.
I was rather disappointed with the response from Government last week in relation to electricity transmission networks. It is important for there to be a structured system of community benefit that is produced by project promoters with reference to clear guidance from Government, which is then transparently examined, with input from communities. If you relate the community benefit to the project concerned and the issues of the community, rather than just paying money over, it would be a much better result in the end. You might also have not only infrastructure projects that have better buy-in from communities but also more support.
Estelle Dehon: I have two main points to make in relation to this. The first is that it is absolutely crucial for communities to be able to feel like they have properly engaged with the system. You are right that, to a certain extent, in the current system that is not necessarily felt. There is a tension between the requirement to move swiftly, which will be achieved by, for example, more use of presumptions and more centralised or regional planning, and that community engagement.
It is feasible to get proper community engagement. In particular, it would have been better had the NPSs more strongly encouraged, right at the outset, very strong stakeholder engagement by those bringing projects forward in a way that was demonstrable and added planning benefit, so it was of value in the planning balance for the developer to do that work.
The second thing is an important point and picks up on what Robbie has just said about community benefit. There is a difference between community benefits, in particular payments to communities, and getting that community’s support. To a certain extent, community benefits will assist in that, but they are not the same thing. Many communities that have opposed development have not been swayed by community payments or community benefits.
There is a strong role for community benefits. If benefits are taken more broadly than just payments, that is definitely the case. The Committee needs to be aware that, as things presently stand in law, the Supreme Court has made it clear that any payments to communities of benefits, for example financial benefits for hosting a wind farm or a solar farm, cannot, as a matter of law, be taken into account in the planning balance. If Parliament wishes to change that position, it cannot do so just by policy. It will have to legislate to say that that has weight in the planning balance.
Q129 Chair: Do you have a view on that?
Estelle Dehon: My view is that it would help to legislate, but that that should not be seen as the silver bullet for dealing with the difficulties that communities face.
Q130 Chair: You are saying to legislate to enable benefits in the planning but also to be mindful that benefits are not necessarily support.
Estelle Dehon: That is correct. They are not the whole story. They are essentially at two ends of the same spectrum. If the benefit can come in with planning weight, that is great. If that very early stakeholder engagement, ideally with a cross-section of the community, can also be given planning weight, and that can be done just by policy, those two things will improve the system.
Q131 Chair: I will rewind from that and go to Julia Prescot on the point I was making about the scope for communities to influence projects in their areas.
Julia Prescot: I would like to take it from a slightly different angle. In order to develop the systems and the transmission systems that we need, we need to be in partnership. That partnership needs to be between the public sector, the private sector and local communities. Unless we are all working together on this, we have this huge task ahead of us.
Within that, when we are looking at working with communities, we need to also talk about the national interest. The national interest is that we have to try to get green energy and get the bills down. When communities are looking at the various schemes that are taking place, there is a very strong argument for them to actually benefit from the fact that they are participating in something that is in the national interest but that locally, on the ground, they may have a view, for example on a visual impact that they do not want to have. Therefore we have to have that national-local partnership debate. That is one part of it.
We feel that proximity benefits would be very helpful, and the Government have responded in relation to this. We feel that those benefits should be mandatory rather than voluntary, which is how the proposal stands at the moment. Another view that we have is that it is very important for communities to know where they are in terms of what is likely to happen under an NPS, what is likely to happen in relation to their NSIP and what is likely to happen to their benefits.
We also take a view that communities need to understand from the outset what the best designs are. Within the NIC we have the design principles that should have community impact. We do not think that it is something that communities should just look at and say, “This is going to be landed on”. They should participate from a very early stage. That has always been our strategic position in relation to this.
Q132 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I wanted to follow up a bit on what you were saying there and then come on to my substantive question. In Brighton, when we had a new hospital built, it blocked off the light of half of the tower block of council houses behind it. My house is in front of it and we had 10 years of disruption and we have lost all light. No one expected any community benefit from loss of light. They understood that there was a wider advantage. Why an earth are we expecting something different when we're talking about energy infrastructure? Why should people have a right to a pretty view? A view is what you mentioned. Why on earth are we even talking and having this conversation? In urban areas, for many years, people just accepted it. Why are rural communities suddenly treated better?
Julia Prescot: I am very happy to respond to that, because it comes back to what I was saying about the national and the local context. The hospital clearly was a benefit to you in terms of proximity.
Q133 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: There is no benefit to any of us because of proximity, because we are kept up at night because of ambulances. In fact, it is far worse that it is there. Most people probably would not have wanted it to be built there, but they did not, in the end, stop it and we did not get payments because of it, even though we were there first and the hospital was not. The benefit was for the whole of Sussex because it was a Sussex tertiary centre. The benefit was not really for us because we live nearby it.
Julia Prescot: In the case of overhead power lines, it is very difficult for local communities to be looking at those as having a direct benefit in terms of their proximity. That is a point that we very much support in terms of making proximity payments to those local communities.
Q134 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Is there a difference between proximity and view, which is what you mentioned?
Julia Prescot: I mentioned that as being one particular impact. I did not want to go into specific concerns that local communities have raised.
Q135 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Does having these quantitative thresholds for what are nationally significant parts of the planning system cause problems when we are talking about certain renewable energy projects that are often smaller in scale but contribute to a bigger nationally significant piece of infrastructure?
Julia Prescot: I would not particularly want to comment on the payments or the levels of the payments, because it is something that is in the Government response. We take a strategic view as opposed to a particular view on the payments.
Robbie Owen: In relation to quantitative thresholds, I think that you are referring to what determines whether a project is a nationally significant project or not.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Yes.
Robbie Owen: As part of the autumn statement announcements last week, Government said that they will be consulting shortly on looking at highway and rail thresholds. I believe that they should also have a look at the energy project thresholds, because at the moment the 50 megawatt threshold in particular produces some interesting results sometimes, with 49.9 megawatt energy generation plants being proposed and other perhaps more artificial decisions made by the market.
I would absolutely support a broader review by Government of all of the energy-related thresholds in the Planning Act of 2008 to check that they are still fit for purpose. As we were commenting on earlier, technology is changing very quickly in this area and the energy thresholds have not been reviewed for 10 years, so that would be very timely.
Estelle Dehon: Yes, I absolutely support that. In fact, the weird upshot of how especially the solar threshold has been placed is that we are seeing 49.9 megawatt solar farms coming forward outside of the NSIP regime and in fact having the capacity, potentially, to generate more than that when they are built out. That leads to a difficulty because that may mean that they have to go through an NSIP-type process in order to generate to the extent of the capacity that they have. Even if the thresholds do not move, there should be some way in which, if you happen to be able to generate a little bit over the threshold, you would be capable of achieving consent for that without having to fall within the NSIP regime.
Q136 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: There are Government proposals around the NSIP reforms to speed up on some of these issues. What reforms should the Government prioritise to reduce the timescales for granting development consent orders?
Estelle Dehon: I will give you three good things that they can do, but let me just say one thing on what you were talking about with Julia in relation to community benefit. What has been missed on energy infrastructure in particular is the narrative. No one could suggest that the narrative around hospitals is not wholly positive and that they are not a good thing and should be built out. The narrative, unfortunately, that has developed around energy infrastructure is not that positive. It is possibly for that reason in particular, tied with the fact that it is absolutely clear on every possible level, with every type of evidence—scientific, economic and community evidence—that in fact this infrastructure has to be built out with rapidity and that we need to shift the narrative quickly. One way to do that is community benefits.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: A good example of that would be the Rampion wind farm just off the coast from where I am, which actually has ended up giving community benefit payments in terms of grants for the community, not the things that would materially make any difference for anyone’s pocket, but for community centres and things like that. Now you find that almost every single person is absolutely in love with the Rampion and says, “Why would we ever object to it?” With the expansion, all of my constituents say, “This is a fantastic project. We really want it”. The two or three people who are against it are in an absolute minority, not because of payments to the community but because of community activities.
Chair: You mean socialise rather than privatise the benefit.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Yes, something like that.
Julia Prescot: That is a key thing. It is actually not just the payments but all the community benefits around the particular scheme. Our position is that we would like those, as I said, to be mandatory, so that people know that they are going to get what the levels are.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Estelle, I interrupted you on the first point. You have two more.
Estelle Dehon: You asked about what planning reforms can be put in place for this infrastructure to come forward quickly. One reform that I had suggested was important, which is certain critical national priorities being designated, including grid infrastructure as part of that, has come out in the new energy NPS, but of course that is for national infrastructure. There are projects that are going through planning outside of that process. It would be good if that critical national priority could also be applied within what I will just call the section 78 or the town and country planning process.
Secondly, in relation to solar and battery installations in particular, there needs to be clarity across all parts of planning, both national infrastructure and town and country planning, that the position of that infrastructure close to a grid connection is something that should have positive planning value. I can give you a lot of examples of where, at the moment, there is significant confusion around that, where it has in some instances been taken into account positively and in some instances not. I am afraid that the recent NPS, or what has been published in the past week, has not solved that problem. It would be very good if that could be clarified. Finally, we may get into this in some more detail a bit later, but that perceived conflict between solar/battery installations and agricultural land needs to be addressed in the planning system.
Q137 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Robbie, do the Government’s proposals for the operational reforms to the NSIP regime pursue these effective solutions?
Robbie Owen: Certainly the action plan that was published in February of this year and then the consultation in July contain some really sensible, good suggestions, which need to be seen through. I understand that Government are intent on doing that by early next year. In terms of wider measures, it is critical that the NPS system is fixed, because otherwise we will be in the same position in five years’ time as we are in now, if not sooner. A top priority must be getting to a more agile system for reviewing NPSs.
Certainly in relation to non-NSIPs, so the smaller projects, what the national planning policy framework says should be revised and the NPSs should be linked into the NPPF much better. At the moment, just paragraph 5 of the national planning policy framework has a very broad reference to, and tries to import into local planning, the national policy statements system, but does not do it very well. Much more detail could be given there to make sure that local decision making on things like matters of critical national priority does what the NPSs do.
Finally, there is no doubt that adequate funding of statutory consultees would really help a smoother and faster NSIP. The inability, because of resourcing constraints, of some of the statutory advisory bodies has not helped projects to go through as quickly as they would wish to have done.
Q138 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Julia, do you have concerns about the Government’s response to the NIC? There are proposed targets for times, but they are not mandated. Is this sufficient? There is this ministerial forum that is going to hope and cajole. You talked earlier about clear, defined benefits.
Julia Prescot: Absolutely, yes. There are timing issues, certainly, that I pick up on. One issue that I would pick on in the response is actually towards environmental data and environmental analysis. Robbie has talked about the need for the adequate funding of statutory consultees. One thing that we were very keen about was making sure that there were properly structured data systems, so that, for example, you did not get developers in one scheme doing a lot of species studies and then developers in the next-door scheme doing exactly the same level of activity as far as the study was concerned. It would be much better to have a more centralised data collection approach.
We would also want to look at it in the context of mitigations and gathering a mitigations library together, so that, instead of this being done on a scheme-by-scheme basis, we were actually looking at a body of information and evidence that could be applied going forwards. This would actually help with the delivery of multiple NSIPs. We have to remember that, under current plans, we are looking at consenting 17 new transmission lines over the next four years, which is a fourfold increase on what we have seen. That means that, unless we have this environmental data together, it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to meet those timescales.
Q139 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Who should hold that data? Is it just that there should be a sharing mechanism, or that some central repository needs to hold some of this data?
Julia Prescot: When we were looking at this, it was felt that it would be good for there to be a central repository holding that data. Obviously everyone would need to have access to that and the statutory consultees would equally need to have access to that.
Q140 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Finally, Robbie—although anyone can pick these questions up—how could the adequacy of consultation milestone ensure that the consultation is kept within reasonable limits without being a tick-box exercise?
Robbie Owen: There is some very good consultation and engagement undertaken and some less good. Practice varies a huge amount. Government guidance on this plays an important role. It has not been updated for a long time and practice has clearly evolved, certainly in the NSIPs arena, over the last 13 years. Updating Government guidance would be very important.
An issue that we have expressed some concern about, in NIPA’s response in September of this year to the consultation in July, is creating too many what you might call pre-application hoops for projects to jump through. It makes it even more complicated and could slow things down, rather than having the opposite intended effect. We are concerned about making the system more intricate and complex. There are other ways of making sure that applicants consult properly. As I say, a lot of applicants consult really well and practice has evolved over the last 13 years admirably.
Estelle Dehon: Yes, I agree with that. Guidance needs to be updated. We have really good experience now in how community consultation can be done well.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: And quickly.
Estelle Dehon: Yes, and quickly. There is a system of local area energy planning. I do not know if you have come across this. It is a way that very small local areas, and wider areas, can rapidly, in a data-driven way, bring together a local energy plan for their areas. That has a lot of quite detailed community consultation and has been able to be undertaken rapidly. There is good practice everywhere and that should feed into the guidance.
Julia Prescot: I will just make a final point on that. Sometimes the idea of speed is in some way associated with a deteriorating position in terms of outcome. Instead, all the proposals certainly that the NIC has come up with have looked to focus on having a better, more efficient outcome in a shorter space of time to reach better the increased delivery. With what Estelle was saying about the way that communities are getting those consultations together, if we can get a library and data together, we are going to be achieving those faster timescales.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Fundamentally, communities still might oppose things and sometimes it needs to be foisted upon them. That is life.
Q141 Mark Pawsey: Julia, you mentioned the word “speed”. Every developer that we talk to talks about how long this process takes. Given that speed is one of the key priorities of the changes that are being made, you gave us a shopping list of the things that the Government needed to do. Everybody agreed on an update every five years, so let us park that on one side. The other things you spoke about were creating a data platform, having a consistent approach, more effective use of spatial planning and sorting out the regime of benefits to the communities. Do all of those have to be done at the same time, or is there a pecking order among those changes that would enable us to deliver some of these applications at greater speed?
Julia Prescot: Of course my immediate response is that, yes, it would be great if they could all be done at the same time. One issue I raised was in relation to looking for spatial planning. We firmly believe that, if we have a spatial plan across the country, that will improve the way in which we can get good planning decisions made.
Q142 Mark Pawsey: That is not going to happen overnight, is it?
Julia Prescot: No, that is what I mean. That is not going to happen overnight. That is one thing I would give as a particular example of something that we are going to see happening in 2024, 2025 or 2026. That is going to be a longer-term one.
Q143 Mark Pawsey: We have not done spatial planning for 20 years, have we?
Julia Prescot: I could not give you a precise time.
Q144 Mark Pawsey: We have not had a national spatial plan. There has been no overarching objective of how we, as a country, want to develop. Do you think that that is necessary?
Julia Prescot: That is absolutely necessary and it would really help over time, but I give it as a particular example of something that is going to take place over a longer period of time. There are other issues that I raise that can actually take place much more quickly. For example, we are seeing the NPSs coming through now quite quickly. They should be designated in March of next year, which is obviously something that is again going to help in outcomes as far as the Planning Inspectorate is going to be concerned. I do not see this as a menu of things that are going to happen instantly. The NIC, by its very nature, looks long term. Added all together, these are going to make a very significant difference.
Q145 Mark Pawsey: I wanted to talk about the categorisation of the different projects. Estelle, you drew our attention to the 50 megawatt threshold. If I am a developer, am I going to be best suited getting my application in under the NSIP regime, the local planning system or the Electricity Act? Which is going to give the best result for me as somebody wanting to improve infrastructure?
Estelle Dehon: That is an interesting question. I think that the intention was for much more, especially solar, to go through the national infrastructure route. Interestingly, what has come about is a proliferation of 49.9 megawatt schemes coming forward under the Town and Country Planning Act. That is because that route is seen to be a more efficient and better route if you want to do a scheme that is capable of being that size.
Q146 Mark Pawsey: The smaller scheme is determined by the local authority.
Estelle Dehon: That is correct.
Q147 Mark Pawsey: The local authority is more likely to be sympathetic to the proposal than if it were to go through the NSIP regime.
Estelle Dehon: I do not think that it is about sympathy. It is about the overall time that is taken within the system.
Q148 Mark Pawsey: Is acceptance of the proposal more likely? What are the stats?
Estelle Dehon: I do not have statistics, so I cannot help you on that.
Robbie Owen: I can help there. To date, we have had about 123 DCOs made across all infrastructure sectors. There is a very high success rate. Only five of those have been quashed in the courts and only 20 of the 123 were challenged, so five of the 20 have been quashed, so there is a high success rate.
You also need to bear in mind that the output you get with the development consent order is much more than just the planning permission. Therefore, the answer to the question is that it depends on the nature of the project. Do you need compulsory purchase powers? Do you need to do things to highways, watercourses, railways or other stuff like that? If you do, the DCO could well be the right answer for that, as opposed to having to get lots of other separate consents and permissions and licences. It is a very different product that you get at the end of the day. There is certainly a lot of evidence now from solar promoters that the 50 megawatt threshold for solar needs looking at again.
Q149 Mark Pawsey: Should there still be a threshold?
Robbie Owen: There should still be a threshold. There is also a discussion to be had about whether we follow what they are legislating for in Wales, which is an ability to opt out of the regime. You can opt into the regime at the moment through what is called a section 35 direction—that has been used consistently for interconnectors and some underground electrical transmission apparatus—but you cannot opt out of the regime if you are caught. There is a belief of some that, for some infrastructure sectors, that would be a useful addition.
Q150 Mark Pawsey: If I am a member of the community wanting to engage, am I better off with something coming through my local planning authority or through the NSIP process?
Robbie Owen: You are better off through the NSIP regime, because you have a six-month examination as opposed to being allowed to address a planning committee for three minutes. It is a very robust examination process. I would say, though, that a top priority that I believe Government should have is to review the working of the six-month examination, because it is a very arduous process. It is quite costly and I think that it could be streamlined.
Q151 Mark Pawsey: Does it need to be six months? Could that time period be reduced?
Robbie Owen: Government are looking at fast-tracking eligible projects to be examined within four months, so that is already being looked at.
Julia Prescot: If I could add something from a developer perspective for a moment, a developer is looking for a way in which everything from the planning perspective can be delivered appropriately and on time, but as quickly as possible. When we look at the timing in relation to the NSIPs going from 2.6 years to 4.2 years in terms of delivery, it really means that you are spending an awful lot more money as a developer. In fact, the commission has identified this figure of £1.5 million.
Q152 Mark Pawsey: Who pays for that in the end?
Julia Prescot: All these delays will go into projects. Projects will fundamentally be paid for by the consumers. Delay equals high cost.
Q153 Mark Pawsey: There is an urgency and an imperative to do something.
Julia Prescot: There is an absolutely imperative, yes.
Q154 Chair: For the layperson watching, can you give us a brief explanation of 45 megawatts and 55 megawatts and the difference that that incurs?
Estelle Dehon: To a certain extent that is about size, so the extent of what the solar panels will cover. If the Town and Country Planning Act scheme or route is chosen, i.e. you are underneath the threshold, you will go through the normal local planning process.
Chair: That is the 50 megawatt threshold.
Estelle Dehon: You will make an application to the local planning authority. That will be considered in the first instance by a planning committee. As Robbie says, there will be an opportunity for people to object and maybe to speak, but that is usually limited. It is really after the decision-making process, for example if there is a refusal, that there is significant potential community engagement with the appeal process that developers go through. That is before the Planning Inspectorate, either via written representations, a hearing or a planning inquiry. That is when local communities tend to have a lot of opportunity to have their say, to physically speak.
In the NSIP regime, as Robbie was saying, there is a completely different initial decision-making process. That is a full six-month, thought through but very heavily written process. The interesting thing is that communities sometimes feel less well represented within the process if they are not able to say, to articulate physically to a human being, what it is that their concerns are. That is something that the NSIP regime has struggled with a little.
Robbie Owen: As part of that six months, you have a series of hearings.
Estelle Dehon: Yes, but they are limited.
Robbie Owen: They can be limited.
Q155 Chair: The evidence would then say that the bias has been to just go for the sub-50 megawatts.
Estelle Dehon: It is very variable. If one has a large project and, as Robbie says, you need a number of different sorts of consent, the NSIP regime is a no‑brainer. It is the best vehicle for that sort of project. If you do not have that sort of project or you have maybe something that is just slightly over the threshold, I can see the sense that it would make to go under the threshold, simply because of cost and time.
Robbie Owen: This is why I think that all energy thresholds should be reviewed. I mentioned recently the interconnectors and underground electricity cables. They often go through the NSIPs regime now, through an opt-in process. That demonstrates in itself that the thresholds in that area are not entirely right.
Mark Pawsey: If you have a review, are the interested parties not simply going to lobby for what suits them best?
Chair: Yes, probably, but that is the way it happens.
Q156 Vicky Ford: Estelle, you have spoken about, where you have solar and battery next to a grid connection, that should have a positive planning value. There needs to be greater clarity on that and there is the need also for greater clarity on the use of agricultural land, and I guess for different grades of agricultural land. What tools could give that clarity?
Estelle Dehon: I will differentiate between the national and the Town and Country Planning Act process. In the national infrastructure process, we had hoped that the energy NPSs would have given the clarity about grid connection. That has, unfortunately, not happened, so that is a missed opportunity.
Q157 Vicky Ford: There needs to be another level of guidance. It has not happened. How do we call for it?
Estelle Dehon: It has not happened. Maybe there could be another level of guidance, or a practice of giving that weight, because the NPSs do not say that you should not give it weight. They just do not say that you should and that would have been better.
Q158 Vicky Ford: This Committee can make recommendations to the Government to take action. For example, should we be saying to the Government, “It would help if you could issue specific guidance on this”?
Estelle Dehon: Yes, exactly. That guidance could apply across the piece. For section 78, definitely, there is a need for the planning practice guidance, which is very old in this area—some of the planning practice guidance is from 2015—to be updated.
Q159 Vicky Ford: You are saying that we should update the planning guidance.
Estelle Dehon: Yes, and specifically that proximity to the grid connection should weigh in the balance in the planning process and, in particular, is a good reason for a developer choosing a particular site over another site, so that you avoid all the debate about, “There is an alternative site, but that is far away from a grid connection”.
Q160 Vicky Ford: In relation to agricultural land, how would clarity be given there?
Estelle Dehon: The easy way to do that for the Town and Country Planning Act system is for the planning practice guidance to be amended. The current planning practice guidance, which, as I say, is very old, says something incredibly unhelpful about agricultural land. It sort of suggests that you have to be able to demonstrate that no agricultural land will be used and, if you are using any agricultural land, that you have very good reasons for doing so. That needs to be removed completely and shifted on its head.
For the NPS system, unfortunately what the current suggested reviewed or revised NPSs say about agricultural and solar and battery is, in my view, unhelpful. It would be great if that was amended, but it is unlikely to happen. Maybe some sort of guidance sitting under that that ameliorates it would be useful.
Q161 Vicky Ford: Robbie and Julia, do you agree with the premise of what Estelle is saying: that updating guidance details in these two areas would help remove inconsistencies?
Julia Prescot: Yes, I do.
Robbie Owen: It would help. Also, there is still, I believe, in relation to solar, a rather unhelpful written ministerial statement from about 2015, which is still relied on by some to object to schemes, whereas clearly the national policy statements are very supportive. There is a need to make sure that there is no conflicting guidance and that what guidance there is is clear.
Q162 Vicky Ford: You will have noticed that there has been an escalation of food prices, an increased concern about food security and pressure from the NFU and others to think about food security as seriously as we think about energy security, which makes sense from a consumer point of view. How do we balance those two things, Robbie, if you are saying that it is unhelpful?
Robbie Owen: My reading of the final draft of EN-1 and EN-3 that were published last week is that it seeks to strike that balance, saying that applicants should seek to minimise impacts on BMV agricultural land and preferably use land in areas of poorer quality. They are not saying that you cannot use BMV land, but you should try to avoid doing so. The revised EN-1 and EN-3, by my reading, are an improvement in that area.
Q163 Vicky Ford: You are saying that we need more detail in guidance.
Robbie Owen: Yes.
Q164 Vicky Ford: I am going to ask the three of you this, because we need to give a really specific recommendation to Government on this if we are going to ask for more detailed guidance on both of these two issues. It would be helpful if, between the three of you, you could come back to us in writing about what sorts of formats the Government might consider. We could consider how we word that in a report.
Estelle Dehon: Can I just say that, on food security, it is absolutely clear that the greatest challenge to food security is climate change impact? There is lots of data that, even if you push solar to the extent that the Government want, there is very little impact that that could have on food security overall for the United Kingdom.
Julia Prescot: The drafting is really talking about the best and most versatile land being avoided and that the presumption is more towards brownfield. That is a good position. It is the draft policy framework and we do not have final policy framework.
Robbie Owen: These national policy statements can only do so much and more detailed guidance, which also could be updated more easily, would be helpful to go alongside some of these really difficult issues that crop up time and time again, such as impact on BMV—best and most versatile—land.
Julia Prescot: The NIC is proposing that there should be modular updates to NPS on a regular basis to take account of changes rather than just looking at it within a five-year cycle.
Q165 Vicky Ford: Do you have examples, Estelle, of where you see this very inconsistent decision-making?
Estelle Dehon: Yes. I can provide the Committee with the names. There have been a number of inspectors’ decisions, in solar and, I think, on a battery farm as well, where best and most versatile agricultural land was being used and that was given no weight in the planning balance. There are others where it has been very significantly held against in the planning balance. There is no consistency on this issue at all.
Q166 Vicky Ford: Is that inconsistency in the NSIP regime and in the local planning system?
Estelle Dehon: It is more strongly in the local planning system, but the NSIP regime does not help. As Robbie said, the NSIP regime bleeds into, and policy will influence, the local system. At the NSIP level it has not been particularly clear.
Q167 Vicky Ford: You have talked about clarity being needed in both of those areas. I am an East Anglia MP and the issue of onshore grid is a big issue. Some people have spoken to me about the need for more clarity on where grid connections go. For example, we spoke earlier about views. Should there be more clarity that pylons should go in valleys, not on ridges? Julia, would more clarity help in that discussion as well?
Julia Prescot: Going back to the overground versus underground cabling, we are looking at that presumption of cost and the presumption in relation to going overground rather than the underground cabling. It is driven largely by a cost element, whereby we know that underground is significantly more expensive. If we get down into very clear specifications, there would also be a cost implication in relation to those. We are going to get it into much more detailed discussions as to what the best thing to do for the community is going to be, rather than that cost question.
Q168 Vicky Ford: There are three different discussions going on here. One is the cost of overland in the air cables versus overland underground. Another is a discussion of overland versus undersea costs. My first question was whether we should give more clarity on the overland in the air route. What would your desired route be to minimise, for example along ridges versus in valleys? How do you weigh that against proximity to woodland etc.? There does not seem to be much guidance on that. Would you agree?
On the cost, has the National Infrastructure Commission looked at the cost estimates that have been prepared by the developers for onshore versus offshore? My view is that a lot of the inability to make a decision is lack of confidence in those numbers.
Julia Prescot: There are several points that you have raised there. The cost one, in relation to being specific on overland, is something that I was raising to say that actually it may well drive communities into not coming up with a decision that they want. The second area, in relation to cost, is that, because we are a strategic body, we do not tend to look at activity on a project-by-project basis.
Q169 Vicky Ford: Do you mean even for a massive strategic project?
Julia Prescot: Even for massive strategic projects, yes, we provide more general advice. Within that decision making, as far as cost is concerned, we are relying on external and general experts, who have advised us that it can be anywhere between four times to ten times as much to go underground as overground. I cannot give any more because in fact it is not our role.
Q170 Vicky Ford: What about sea route versus land route?
Julia Prescot: I could not give you any more than those very general outlooks, because we have not looked at this in detail on a project‑by‑project basis.
Q171 Vicky Ford: Estelle used a phrase at the beginning that I cannot recall, but it was about lack of confidence in planning for energy infrastructure versus planning for health. Would you agree that people’s lack of confidence in what the cost of these things is, and what the cost to the consumer of not doing these things is, plays into that overall lack of confidence?
Estelle Dehon: To a certain extent, yes. You put your finger on a very important aspect that has been left out of the planning system but I think is increasingly coming into it, which is that there is very often good analysis of what the cost-benefits are of a certain scheme, but the disbenefit or the costs to communities if you fail to bring something forward or fail to act in a certain way are not really quantified. The overall climate impacts of not acting are going to need to be costed a bit more strongly.
Vicky Ford: The cost of not doing things may be something that we should pick up on.
Estelle Dehon: It is the cost of inaction.
Q172 Vicky Ford: I have another question about community benefits. Estelle, you talked earlier about the Supreme Court judgment that says that you cannot take community benefits into consideration as a planning matter. Does that mean that, if you have two planning applications for a wind turbine in a village and one of them is going to let the people in the village have discounted electricity, say, in a local grid and the other is not, you do not take into account that community benefit in your planning decision?
Estelle Dehon: Nothing that is unrelated to what is called land use can be taken into account in the planning balance, so direct payments certainly cannot be. That type of benefit is very tricky and often it is not taken positively into account in the planning balance side.
Q173 Vicky Ford: To change that, we need to legislate.
Estelle Dehon: Yes.
Q174 Vicky Ford: A recommendation that we should be considering legislation in this area would be helpful. I understand that it is not a silver bullet. Do you all agree?
Robbie Owen: I agree.
Q175 Vicky Ford: In terms of the direct payments to communities, the Government said last week that the properties closest to the grid network will get £10,000 per property. I did not see anything about how close. Was there any more clarity on that?
Robbie Owen: I am not aware.
Vicky Ford: You have only seen what I have seen.
Chair: I wanted a pylon because it was £1,000 for a pylon.
Q176 Vicky Ford: You have already said that you are concerned that these direct payments could just be seen as community bribes, trying to bribe the community to take it, and the community could react quite negatively to that.
Robbie Owen: Yes, as I think they have already done, looking at BBC Online at the weekend. It is a rather crude form of community benefit and the Government need to develop a much more sophisticated tool.
Q177 Vicky Ford: On that community benefits point, you have made very good points about it. Are there any models in other countries that we should be looking at that you think are doing this well?
Julia Prescot: If I could answer that from a strategic perspective, in France we see community benefits, supporting, for example, high-speed rail, that give us another perspective. I am not saying that it is necessarily perfect, because there are as many discussions about it in France.
Vicky Ford: I am always interested in what we can do.
Robbie Owen: There are lots of examples. I was talking to someone the other day. Denmark has quite a sophisticated regime for benefits for those near onshore wind farms. In relation to transport you have the Netherlands and Amsterdam airport. I think they have a big scheme there. There are lots of examples.
Q178 Vicky Ford: A number of you have mentioned statutory consultees needing to be paid more money to make sure that they can do the work properly. Julia, you also raised the issue of costs sometimes escalating and not sharing information in your library of different environmental surveys on the same things. Who pays for the statutory consultees? Is this going to be the developers paying more money towards the statutory consultees? How do we make sure that that is not just seen as an open cheque by the consultees to charge the developers whatever they want to goldplate everything?
Robbie Owen: That is an extremely good point and we picked up on this in NIPA’s consultation response in September. We are concerned about the wholesale move by Government to cost recovery, and this is part of the current reform proposals. Partial cost recovery certainly has a place, but you have to answer the question of what you get for it. There is real concern in the developer community about this wholesale move to cost recovery without clarity in terms of what the product is and how it is regulated.
I do not think that it is the only answer. Government need to look at better funding as well for bodies such as the Environment Agency and Natural England so that they can actually participate in the examination of NSIP applications. Often, they are unable to because they do not have the resources. This is a critical area that Government could fix relatively quickly.
Q179 Vicky Ford: It is quite difficult when the statutory consultee is also their own regulator.
Robbie Owen: It can be, although that is not the general experience we find with NSIP applications in the ability for the likes of Natural England to engage.
Q180 Vicky Ford: This was not in our list of questions, but I want to drill down on it. In this full cost recovery, would it be sensible to recommend that there was some expectation that costs need to be kept under control and well managed?
Robbie Owen: Definitely, yes.
Q181 Vicky Ford: Do you want to give us some thoughts on that, Julia?
Julia Prescott: One of the things that we are seeing emerging is the use of service level agreements between developers and statutory consultees. They have performance indicators included in them, which give the basis for an agreement whereby developer funding does not just pay for the statutory consultation. There is a two-way delivery position.
Robbie Owen: There is lots of experience of this in local planning authorities with planning performance agreements. Therefore, the same techniques could be applied to other bodies such as Natural England and the Environment Agency.
Q182 Vicky Ford: Do you want to give us a clear phrase about putting in a mechanism to ensure that costs are managed reasonably and held under control? Estelle, you are the lawyer.
Estelle Dehon: Off the top of my head, you mean?
Vicky Ford: No, you can think about it.
Estelle Dehon: I will think about that. Just to echo what has been said, that is important. The role played by statutory consultees is a general good in the public interest. It is not a role that should be wholly paid for by developers. It is a general good for all of society that these statutory consultees engage and engage robustly in this process.
Robbie Owen: Yes, absolutely.
Q183 Mark Pawsey: I have one quick final question. We have heard a lot about the Town and Country Planning Act process versus the nationally significant infrastructure project regime, but we have not heard anything about the Electricity Act 1989. Robbie, are any changes necessary there to speed up this process?
Robbie Owen: The Electricity Act 1989, which applies particularly in Scotland, needs some major modernisation. That would be my view in a nutshell. It does not benefit from all of the modernisation we have with the NSIP regime, which we are now seeing Wales legislate for.
There is a crying need here. The Government are aware of this—it is a matter reserved to Westminster—and are shortly going to be consulting on proposals for reform, such as putting time limits on decisions made under section 37 for overhead lines and improving the management of public inquiries. There is an urgent need for this. The system for overhead lines in Scotland has not been fully tested by a major scheme for about 10 years, but there are some major schemes coming. It is important that it is done soon.
Chair: Thank you, panel. That concludes the first section of today’s hearing.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Fiona Gilmore, Justin Johnson, Alan Law and Jo Wall.
Q184 Chair: Welcome back to this Energy Security and Net Zero Committee session on the planning system. We have a panel of four this time. I will let you introduce yourselves. Please give us your name, rank and serial number, as you choose.
Fiona Gilmore: Good morning. My name is Fiona Gilmore. I am the founder and director of Suffolk Energy Action Solutions, SEAS. It is a solutions-oriented community group, which is a bit unusual. You are used to ones that whinge a lot. We are looking for innovative practical solutions to some of the energy infrastructure issues facing us today. In particular, we are looking at East Anglia and the golden opportunities to make the most of offshore solutions and brownfield sites.
Justin Johnson: I am Justin Johnson. I am the development manager at Rutland County Council. I have 20-plus years of experience working in local government, dealing with a number of applications, including major solar farms. More recently I have been involved with the national infrastructure project for a major solar farm, 350 megawatts and 825 hectares, at Mallard Pass in Rutland.
Alan Law: I am Alan Law. I am an executive director at Natural England, which is Government’s non-departmental public body looking after nature for England. We sit predominantly within the DEFRA group.
Jo Wall: I am Jo Wall. I work for Local Partnerships. I have previously been a commercial solar developer for a period of about eight years. I have also run planning authorities. I have particular interests in things such as public consultations and community benefit, and I have some thoughts on strategic planning as well.
Q185 Chair: Should the Government land use framework identify which land is needed for energy infrastructure and which should be reserved for other purposes such as agriculture, environmental conservation or whatever?
Jo Wall: That would be really helpful, particularly when you look at where the grid falls free. A lot of it has to be driven from an energy perspective as to where there is capacity on the grid. Anything else is just fantasy.
To understand that in land use terms, local planning authorities have not had long to start getting their heads around grid capacity. What we are seeing, particularly in the NSIPs at the moment, for example, is that the closure of the coal-fired power stations is leading to a real clustering of some of these applications.
You are seeing relatively small areas with gigawatts of power. We have about 15 gigawatts of solar in the UK at the moment. There is one district council in Lincolnshire that currently has applications in for 2.7 gigawatts.
Chair: I take it that it is a very sunny place.
Jo Wall: It is just very close to an old power station. That is further aggravated by the fact that the connection point is not in their district, so they will not even receive the business rates. The business rates will pass to the neighbouring authority.
Alan Law: Broadly speaking the answer is, yes, it would be welcome. There are some caveats though. I would really welcome it if the Committee were to appreciate two bits of context.
First, historically, the focus on nature conservation in this country has been very much one about identifying areas to protect: identifying areas and designating them or identifying rare species and protecting them. We are in a state of twin environmental crises, existential crises, around the climate and nature declines. A strategy predicated on simply protecting things that are ringfenced is not going to work on either front.
We are trying to move to one that has a focus on recovery, which means operating and planning at a much larger scale. That provides much greater opportunities for different ways of delivering environmental outcomes and different ways of configuring and delivering other parts of infrastructure.
My caveat in your question is that I would not wish to see infrastructure and nature simply regarded as things you keep separate, as though you do one of them here and one of them over there. If we are to achieve the ambitions for nature, climate, economic development and our social requirements, we are going to have to plan in a much more holistic way and at a much larger scale. That requires a bit of give on all fronts, but the opportunities are there.
A land use framework that enables more effective strategic planning, prioritisation and decision making on the ground or at sea would be entirely welcome in that regard, but I just want to emphasise that point around integration rather than separate demarcation.
Q186 Chair: Yes, I suppose wildlife can use bits of infrastructure for nesting or whatever. That is a possibility.
Alan Law: Yes, absolutely. Development is going to be one of the main ways in which we deliver some of those aspects of nature recovery. It is not simply about trying to protect little islands of things that are already there. It is about being much more creative and imaginative about how you deliver nature-positive development.
Jo Wall: It is important, and it would be useful in terms of bringing along local communities. If you have an idea of where development is needed, that is the starting point for the community. It tells them what is needed in their area. It is important that there is community engagement in how those spatial plans are developed. This also feeds into some of the discussion you were having earlier around this issue about agricultural land competing with the need for energy infrastructure. If there could be some strategic guidance and planning on that, that would help.
Fiona Gilmore: I am not going to repeat things, because I agree with the points made earlier, but what I would like to add is that we benchmarked Britain against the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Denmark, looking at their best practices and how they look at their spatial strategies. We also interviewed Professor Tim Green at Imperial College London. That was back in 2019.
There was an acceptance and an acknowledgement that in this country we had failed to have a holistic spatial strategy. We did not have that strategic focus that looked at the mid and long term. We tended to be very short-term in our zoning and planning.
We propose that centralised strategic planning on brownfield sites being used wherever possible for major energy hubs is absolutely central to our future planning and acceptance from local communities. If you look at Belgium, they chose Zeebrugge. If you look at the Netherlands, they chose Rotterdam. If you look at Britain, we chose Friston, a medieval village. We are talking about, in the future, trying to use brownfield sites closer to demand, because you maximise your energy efficiency if you do that. You can have a reduction in constraint costs and you can go more efficiently using HVDC.
There seems to be an extraordinary reluctance in this country to use brownfield. From conversations with National Grid ESO, we know it is much more expensive to upgrade brownfield than it is to go to green countryside that is unspoiled. We need to understand that those costs for upgrading are insignificant in the context of the 50 gigawatt goals that we now face.
Q187 Mark Pawsey: I want to ask some questions about the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act and, first of all, the environmental outcome reports. Mr Law, can I ask you for your assessment of that new procedure? Will it go any way to achieving one of the objectives we were speaking about in the last panel, which is really to speed up the process?
Alan Law: It is still the case that the proposed system is being worked through. The Government are going to consult on the proposals, regulations and guidance in 2024. We are broadly supportive of the ambition of using environmental outcome reports as a means of simplifying environmental assessment and taking us into a space where we look at recovery as well as the protection of existing features. We do see opportunities for that. Whether that will lead to the speeding up of assessments is yet to be determined.
Q188 Mark Pawsey: Could I also ask you about the principle of setting up baseline environmental data? If somebody is bringing forward an application, currently they have to spend three years gathering that environmental data. That tends to slow things down. Another developer who is looking at a similar development may even be required to do the same thing. Is it going to help things if we bring this together and get this data on file?
Alan Law: Early gathering and assembly of data will permit a quicker assessment. We need a proper evaluation of proposals to—
Q189 Mark Pawsey: Do we already have this data in some cases from the massive applications that have taken place across the country?
Alan Law: In some cases it exists. The challenge is around getting data sharing between companies that have gathered data for their own particular purposes. They may not necessarily wish to share that data with a potential competitor.
Q190 Mark Pawsey: Should they be compelled to do that?
Alan Law: If the legal framework enabled that data sharing, that would help. It would help from an environmental perspective.
Q191 Mark Pawsey: It avoids the duplication of effort. There is no point doing something that somebody else has already done.
Alan Law: Indeed, that would help from an environmental perspective and it would help speed up the decision-making process.
Q192 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I want to know how the planning system could provide local communities with more agency to build greater local support for energy projects where that is possible. Jo, should community benefits be formally recognised as a material part of the planning process? We heard from the panel earlier on that that is a problem at the moment.
Jo Wall: Yes, they probably should. If you go out and consult on the ground, you tend to find that communities are so angry that it is very difficult to have any kind of meaningful conversation about what the future might look like if a project were built. As a developer, it is difficult to have the community benefit conversation.
From my perspective, it should be a material planning consideration. At the moment, I am sick to the back teeth of planning consultants saying, when you open a negotiation on community benefit, “It is not a material planning consideration. Would you like to hear what we are prepared to offer you?” rather than you having any leverage in that negotiation. At the moment, there is no leverage.
The other thing I am really keen on is there being more of an understanding in the system of the value that some of the agents in this system will take from it over time. We should bear in mind that a lot of them are not UK-based. Some of the profit will not just not stay local; it will not stay in the UK. We talked earlier about whether it is the consumer who pays. If you look at the economics of these projects and what is currently being offered, fractions of 1% are being offered as community benefit. Communities feel like that is taking the mick.
How creatively that is used is a separate question. For example, if you were to take a 250 megawatt solar farm, which these days is not particularly big, on the NSIP process they would pay between £3,000 and £4,000 a megawatt in rent for that. The other operating costs will be around £20,000 a megawatt. If you look at ongoing community benefit from that, at the moment they are looking to offer somewhere between £250 and £400 a megawatt. It is really not very much of the operating cost.
If you look at the benefit the person who owns it takes, they will be taking tens of millions. What is on offer is not proportionate with what people feel like they have lost.
Q193 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: There is a danger that people locally feel that they have lost a lot more than they actually have: “I have lost my view”. Who cares? Get to grips with it. Most of the countryside is not untouched. It is man-made. The South Downs did not look like that originally before humans were here. People need to get a grip of what their views look like, which is not natural.
Equally, if you end up with this bartering system where communities are asking for these things, does there need to be a national framework of, “For this level of harm, this is the ballpark figure we are talking about. This is what independent people think the harm is”, rather than people being upset because they have lost the view from their bathroom window?
Jo Wall: That would be an eminently sensible approach. We should have a mandated level of community benefit and more consideration as to how that is used and spent. I was a little disappointed with what came back with the overhead line infrastructure. I can see some of that, but it would be really helpful to have a more strategic view on how community benefits are used and spent for the benefit of the wider community.
Q194 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: They should be used for the benefit of the whole community rather than just a bung to individuals.
Jo Wall: There is an element of the hyper-local probably needing some direct compensation.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Yes, if you have the panel in your back garden, maybe.
Jo Wall: Yes. There is some of that, but there is also a wider potential benefit that should be taken from some of these overseas countries, which would allow us to drive forward things like the net zero agendas across a wider area. We could use them to create funds for domestic retrofitting, for example, to help those in fuel poverty or to help with flood alleviation. There is a much more creative piece of thinking that could be done around community benefit.
The reason I am sat here today is that I am a big believer in the idea that we have to do this. I am a big believer that we lost the public in 2015. We saw that in the ministerial statement, which made life so very difficult for solar. That was followed in 2016 by the restrictions on offshore wind. We need to keep the public with us. We need to try to do that by getting people to understand that there is some give and take in the system.
Q195 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Justin, what are your views on community benefit being recognised formally in the planning system? How do we make sure we recognise it and prevent it from being about who can offer the biggest cash bonus rather than who can make the best contribution to what we need?
Justin Johnson: Jo and Local Partnerships are working with Rutland on the Mallard Pass development. It is important. Some of the guidance that came out last week in terms of making community benefits mandatory will help.
Q196 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: It is still not going to be a material consideration.
Justin Johnson: No. If we can legislate and make it a material planning consideration, that would be even better. When you are talking to communities about this, like Jo said, you go into meetings with developers and their starting point is, “It is not a material consideration. This is what we are going to offer you”. You are starting from a very low bar in terms of what you can negotiate into a package and what benefits you can get for the community.
The communities themselves also do not necessarily see it as a benefit package to start with. Their starting point is that it is more like a compensation package for having the solar farm on their doorstep.
Q197 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: It is, though, is it not? Let us be honest.
Justin Johnson: It is. If there was better communication and better community involvement early doors, the local community might have a better understanding of the national need to have these projects in these locations. Then it all feeds through and you get better community engagement at the start of the process.
Alan Law: I just want to chip in. We are exploring this principally from the view of reactive measures to deal with a proposed development. I just want to emphasise the importance of local nature recovery strategies in this space as a more proactive means of setting out the needs of communities in terms of environment, development and landscape. Having that vision of what is going to be developed up front as a vehicle for getting community engagement ahead of individual applications coming through is something that should not be lost sight of.
Q198 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: What you are talking about and what some of the discussion about spatial plans and things like that are about is getting communities together to plan what they want their local community to look like. When applications come through, the assumption is that those applications will be less opposed.
Alan Law: There will be some support for them, certainly some support or understanding of what those applications are funding or helping to deliver in the way of enhancement.
Q199 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: We do that already with neighbourhood plans in towns and cities. You can have CIL pots. I can tell you that no neighbourhood plan has reduced people complaining about developments in their area. In fact, most of them say, “There is a neighbourhood plan, but we were not involved in that. We do not care about the overall plan. We only care about the specifics”. They do not engage. Even if you try to engage them, they actively do not want to engage in the wider piece. They only want to engage in the specifics. That has been my experience in town planning.
Why would that be any different in energy infrastructure planning? Why would people engage in something that is more hypothetical and wider? They have busy lives. They are surely only going to engage when it is on their doorstep or in their view. Then, suddenly, they have an interest and it is too late.
Alan Law: I agree. It will be hard to get engagement around specific aspects of infrastructure. It should be possible to get more engagement around place and what place means to a local community. That is the way into it.
Q200 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: It is a wider piece around what you want your community to look like.
Alan Law: Yes.
Q201 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Fiona, I want to come to you. I want to ask you to comment on those points and the challenges you have had in engaging in the planning of the network in your group and the solutions you are putting forward.
Fiona Gilmore: I am champing at the bit here.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I know. I could see you.
Fiona Gilmore: To us, last week was a gimmick or a stunt. It made people quite angry. We need a much more sophisticated tool. We need to look at the economic impact of these projects. If nature-based tourism is your main sector of revenue and there is a forecast saying that 10 to 12 years of construction for an energy project is going to reduce your visitors by 15% year on year, how do you compensate those people for the job losses? These are SMEs whose businesses might go under.
There is a need to look at the economic adverse impact, but you also have to look at the community impact. You need to look collectively and individually. Let us say you are a retired pensioner who has saved up and bought a house for £600,000. When it is valued 10 years later, they might say, “You have lost 60% of the value because you have three converter stations on your doorstep”. If that person needs to go into a care home, they will need to get the money out of that cottage.
Do you understand what I am talking about? There are some real economic challenges.
Q202 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: There are the same economic challenges in any area when a building devalues. It is very unfortunate, but why should energy infrastructure have a special get-out above all other pieces of infrastructure that cause the devaluation of property?
Fiona Gilmore: It is as simple as this. You are looking at a massive infrastructure programme that represents over 30% of Britain’s electricity. If you are a through road for it, there has to be some understanding. In the first place, I believe you do not even need to go there. If you did what I said, which is use brownfield sites, we would not even be having these conversations.
Fundamentally, the question of centralised strategic planning needs to be resolved. The other thing that needs to happen to avoid some of these issues is to get the community working with the public sector in a more proactive and constructive way. We could have community overview panels, or COPs, as I am calling them.
Chair: There are good COPs and bad COPs.
Fiona Gilmore: These are good COPs. You would have professionals on them. There would be professionals such as engineers and economists. If DESNZ put money into these COPs—let us say £100,000—for proper professional surveys, first, the parish councils would not be so overwhelmed. They are duplicating efforts. As Richard Rout said in his submission from Suffolk County Council, parish councils are overwhelmed and confused. They do not have the professionals.
The local communities are raising money to do these surveys, working with Natural England and others. Why do we not share all this information, with professional input and professional and digital data gathering that is shared with all communities and the public?
Q203 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Although it was from a different perspective, the previous panel was talking about having a central repository for all of these studies.
Fiona Gilmore: Yes, absolutely.
Q204 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: That would mean communities and developers would not be repeating them. You would have a set standard that you could all sign up to and agree.
Fiona Gilmore: With these COPs, you could access what I call the universal repository of data gathering. It is annual and continuous for every region in the country. It is not just done because there is a DCO application; it is done non-stop, continually. You have farmers and landowners collecting the data. There is a system; there is a process.
When you want to know what is going on in the Hundred River with the 875 species that Scottish Power failed to notice—they failed to notice the Hundred River—you can go to the central repository. You do not have to have a ridiculous and childish argument—“Does the river exist? Are there seriously 875 species?”—and be doing the studies at the wrong time.
Q205 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: You can have the argument about whether it is worth damaging this river or this person’s property for the national interest. Even if that person does not like it, they have to stomach it. They will not get full compensation.
Fiona Gilmore: That is a very grown-up conversation. You should have it, as the Winser report proposes, at the very outset before you decide on the location. In other words, let us get the best of both worlds. Brilliant centralised strategic planning, including brownfield sites where possible, and local input at the very beginning, not when it is too late and you have lots of irate local communities.
Q206 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I am being pushed by the Chair to move on because of time. I want to ask a quick yes-or-no question across the panel. The Government have recently committed to a national information campaign to explain the need for energy transmission infrastructure to try to change the dial of the conversation I was having earlier about people not objecting to hospitals even though they are horribly polluting if you live next to them but objecting to a pylon that really does not challenge them.
We are going to do a national information campaign about the need for energy transmission. Is there a need for a similar campaign to explain renewable generation infrastructure so that people understand it is part of a national campaign to meet our net zero targets? Do we need that kind of change in the conversation?
Jo Wall: It would be very helpful, and the opportunity should be taken to try to put to rest some of those arguments around food versus farming as part of that conversation.
Alan Law: Yes, but why not include it with the first one rather than as something separate?
Justin Johnson: Yes, I totally agree with the points that Jo made.
Fiona Gilmore: Yes, but it has to be in parallel with that initial community engagement so they were informed before anyone about what was happening in their area. It has to be at the very beginning.
Q207 Vicky Ford: I have a quick question, Jo. When you have met different individuals who are concerned about the impact of local energy infrastructure to them, how much of it is, “I am concerned about my house price devaluation”, or, in Fiona’s example, “I run a tourist business and one of the reasons people come here is because it is beautiful, unspoiled and untainted”? How much of it is about the genuine economic impact that it could have rather than just what Lloyd seems to suggest is people caring about their view? It is more than that, is it not?
Jo Wall: It is a combination of things. People are genuinely worried about house prices. It is not a material planning consideration, and it never can be because the market is too fluid. The reality is that, if you live in the middle of one of these projects that is coming forward in your area, you probably have five or six years where it will be difficult to sell your house. That is probably a legitimate concern, to be fair, but it is not a material planning consideration.
What I see is a combination of people trying to throw the kitchen sink at things because they just do not want it and they do not like change and some genuine concerns. It can be difficult to boil it down to the things that really matter and how we deal with those issues.
Q208 Vicky Ford: There are genuine concerns, especially disruption during the build period. You do not know what it is going to look like; it might make it hard to sell your house.
Jo Wall: It can be very difficult to quantify some of those potential economic impacts as well. It feels like the planning system is not looking for those things necessarily, unless you can generate the data.
Q209 Vicky Ford: We talked earlier about the need for full cost recovery. Will it deliver the necessary levels of service from local authorities and other consultees, if they can get their full costs back?
Jo Wall: It would help, but there are some genuine resource constraints in a lot of local authorities, particularly planning authorities. They struggle to recruit. You could make a lot of things a lot more straightforward, such as the PPA system. We could have an agreed schedule of rates and a standard agreement that is used nationally, and everyone would just get on and do it.
Q210 Vicky Ford: What does “PPA” mean?
Jo Wall: A PPA is a planning performance agreement, which is how the local authorities are funded, for example.
Equally, with all of the reports, one of the things I would say is that communities find it overwhelming to deal with the quantity of information that is put in front of them as part of an NSIP application. You could take weeks to read it. If you go through it, the stuff that actually matters could probably be in a 20-page report. There are a lot of consultants generating a lot of paperwork because that is how we have always done it.
Alan Law: I just wanted to come in on the cost recovery point. Like some other bodies, we are experiencing quite a high degree of pressure around skills. The market is very competitive at the moment. The pay points in the public sector are relatively low and not necessarily competitive.
At the moment, we also are not in a position where we can cost-recover at all. Our operating model is based entirely on Government granting aid. That means we are not able to flex the service we provide to offer a more bespoke service. If demand is high in one year, there is just a lag.
Q211 Vicky Ford: Do you agree with the comments we had from the other panel about how these costs need to be kept under control?
Alan Law: They need to be kept under control, but you need a mechanism that enables us to have sustainable skills retention within the organisation to deliver the service. Delays in advice in the planning process have multiple knock-ons in terms of cost to the developer. We also need to be able to adapt our service and offer a service that is flexible to the developer’s needs.
Q212 Vicky Ford: Justin and Jo, to bring you in as well, if parish councils were enabled to have more resources, could they help with the community work better?
Justin Johnson: Yes, definitely. In the NSIP we were dealing with, we spent a lot of time talking to the parish councils. They got together and formed an action group as well. The action group collected a lot of money to undertake a lot of survey results and things like that. It is the same issue. There are lots of documents for them to go through. They spend a lot of time going through them and getting their own information. There are costs there.
If I could come back to cost recovery for planning authorities, the way we try to recoup our money is through planning performance agreements. Again, that is in negotiation with the developers. They are quite keen to minimise those. At no point have we recovered our full costs. Again, the skill shortage is an issue.
Some authorities may only get one NSIP in their area. As we have heard, some get lots. There is a difference between whether you try to recruit on a permanent basis, which is very difficult, or whether you try to buy in that service. Again, you will have to try to recover the costs for buying in that service.
Q213 Vicky Ford: The comment was made earlier about the need to have a better data library. If you had a site, you would not be redoing all the ecological work such as species checks etc.; you could just share it across. Justin and Jo, how would local communities feel about having second-hand information on a project?
Justin Johnson: Again, there are a number of issues with that. From my experience, local communities question when it is coming from developers. If it has gone into a data bank that is legitimised in some way, that would be useful. Local communities do question it when it has been done by developers. That generates extra costs for extra reports and more delay in reading these sorts of things. There is a benefit for it.
The problem will be in how you make the companies that have done the initial work willing to share it with potentially competing companies. That is what sits in my mind as a problem.
Jo Wall: There are a couple of things to say here. First, by definition, a lot of that information gets put in the public domain through the planning system. You do not have the ability to join it up, connect it and make some national database. Resource-wise, it is probably not realistic to try to do a full national survey every year. We might like to, but that probably is not realistic. The ability to join up what goes into the system in terms of study-based results would add value, particularly on the nature side.
Secondly, in terms of the reports that come in on those and what people feel they need to challenge on, quite a lot of them are time-bound. With things like ecology, it has to be within the last couple of years to be an up-to-date report, but the baseline information from three or four years ago would still be useful. There are others that are not particularly time-bound, such as flooding, noise reports and those sorts of things. You could probably have a much lighter touch in the planning process with a lot of those because the data is simply there.
Q214 Vicky Ford: Going back to Justin, in terms of resolving the resource constraints you see on your local authority, what other things should the Government be doing in terms of priorities to try to unlock that?
Justin Johnson: There could be clearer guidance in terms of what we expect to see in planning performance agreements for national infrastructure projects. There could be some sort of threshold table that sets out what local authorities could expect rather than the free-for-all we have at the moment, where local authorities are left to negotiate as best they can.
Currently, it depends on how good you are at negotiating, who is sat across the table from you and how willing the developer is to pay. There are examples where they will not enter into a PPA. They just say, “You have to do this anyway”.
Q215 Vicky Ford: Jo, we had a discussion with the earlier panel about the cost of not doing a project, especially if it is a really large strategic project. How much do local communities feel that is important? Take Lloyd’s example. His neighbours did not complain too much about the hospital expanding because they knew that the whole city needed a new hospital and the opportunity cost of not doing that would affect health all over the community.
Do you feel that local communities understand that they are doing something good for everybody across the country because they are bringing in cleaner, greener, cheaper and more secure energy if they have these projects?
Jo Wall: That is a dialogue that has not really successfully played out across communities. We could take some learning that might be helpful. When things are first proposed, there is a lot of anger and upset, understandably. At the same time, a lot of that infrastructure is here in the UK at scale and has been for a long time. If you talk to the people who live in those areas, a lot of them would say to the communities that are getting new infrastructure, “Actually, some of it is okay”.
Personally, I struggle more with overhead lines and substations a bit more than I do with turbines and the solar farms because they are much more difficult to hide in the countryside, if that makes sense. You cannot hide a turbine, but you get used to it. It is really important that that is a dialogue that—
Vicky Ford: You cannot have the turbines and solar panels without the lines and substations.
Jo Wall: As a developer, it is quite difficult to tell the story of a solar farm. If you think about the scale of them now, they have gone from being five megawatts to 850 megawatts in the space of 14 years. We thought five megawatts was big in 2010. If you go back to some of those now, there has been lots and lots of really good study-based work on nature, species, recovery and all of the good things we sold as the message then.
They have come to fruition, but we are not very good at getting that out there. The only people who have that information and who want to share it are the developers. Everyone is like, “You are clearly not telling me straight”. A national dialogue that comes from respected bodies would be helpful.
Q216 Vicky Ford: Fiona, you have campaigned very hard for an offshore grid. I see you are also very opposed to offshore wind. Is that correct? I see quotes from you in the press that you were devastated when large offshore wind projects were given approval.
Fiona Gilmore: No, not at all.
Vicky Ford: I saw a quote online just now.
Fiona Gilmore: I have been a strategic adviser for alternative fuels overseas with other Governments. I am passionately in favour of renewables. Lowestoft should become a centre of excellence for renewable R&D. I have been misquoted.
Q217 Vicky Ford: You are just opposed to onshore grid. Is that correct?
Fiona Gilmore: We benchmarked Belgium and Holland in 2019. They have successfully implemented Modular Offshore Grid 1 and 2 in Zeebrugge. TenneT Holland is the equivalent of National Grid ESO, except it is mutual independent; it is not part of a publicly quoted company. They have developed master plans and they have chosen to use offshore grids.
It is easier for them because they are smaller countries with smaller coastlines and smaller wind farms. However, the same technology and principles apply to Britain. Professor Nick Butler, who is an eminent energy economist, has supported our offshore solution proposals. We say it is £2 billion cheaper, if we do pilot tests 1 and 2 as per our proposal, for Nautilus and LionLink to absorb and pool energy with Scottish Power, EA1N, EA2, North Falls and Five Estuaries, taking them to brownfield sites.
We believe that it is in the interests of Britain that we test offshore solutions. We are talking about less landfall infrastructure. You do not have to build the substations for EA1N, EA2, North Falls and Five Estuaries on land. Instead, you pool at sea and therefore you never build those substations.
National Grid does not take into account the costs of other developers. When they present their costs, you are comparing apples with pears. It is very important you know that because they will get the last word. They will come and talk to here at a panel later on and I will not get the last word. I am saying to you today to make sure that you are comparing apples with apples. We are costing two offshore pilot tests. We are using National Grid’s figures from the December 2020 report. We are saying that you do that instead of building the substations.
A six-year-old did something when I put out the map in a classroom the other day. We use a lot of maps in our conversations. You put out a map and you say, “There are the wind farms. There is London. There is coastal Suffolk. How do you get the wind farm energy in the most direct way to London?” What does a six-year-old do? He draws with his ruler a straight line down to the Isle of Grain, Tilbury, Bradwell and so on. He does not make a deviation. The old model was to go horizontally.
Vicky Ford: I understand you are saying this, but we are really short on time.
Fiona Gilmore: It is worth looking at.
Q218 Vicky Ford: Are there other countries that have delivered an integrated offshore grid?
Fiona Gilmore: Yes, but I am not talking about a complete offshore grid. I am talking about doing two pilot tests so we can learn from them as a country. It is flexible, so you build it over a period of time.
Q219 Vicky Ford: Are you talking about just the substations being offshore but the pylons still being across the country?
Fiona Gilmore: We need a mixed portfolio.
Vicky Ford: I have one last question. I am sorry. It is Prime Minister’s questions in six minutes.
Fiona Gilmore: We may not need as many pylons.
Q220 Vicky Ford: Is it possible to use strategic planning to balance marine conservation with the development of offshore energy infrastructure?
Alan Law: Yes. The two need to be done together. We would start from the position that, if we look at our seas and the demands that are placed on them for nature, aggregates, fishing and energy, there are potentially more asks being placed on them than the seas can accommodate. We need to do strategic planning to ensure we do not take a piecemeal approach that means, by the time we reach critical capacity, some of our most important things are the things that are squeezed out at the end.
There is a lot to be said for looking at energy production and grid transmission together. Historically they were looked at separately. Wind farms were placed and then the grid was planned in retrospectively. That led to all kinds of tensions.
There is also scope for new technologies to look at reducing the impacts associated with grid infrastructure on our network of marine and indeed coastal protected sites. Can they be accommodated? Yes. Strategic planning is necessary to bring the two together.
Q221 Chair: Just before we wrap up, Fiona Gilmore, you have made an important point, and panellists can often feel this: that National Grid will come after you and say something else. You will have a right to respond in writing, if you want. I would encourage you to listen to that session. If you want to come back with anything, we would welcome any further comments you have on that.
Fiona Gilmore: Chair, thank you for that. I would like to say that it has been incredibly frustrating. We have asked for an up-to-date assessment, from 2023, of Bradwell as a brownfield site in comparison with Friston. National Grid has failed to produce that. Its 2017 report has also been redacted. We believe that the circumstances in this country have changed energy security. Bradwell should be reappraised, given the new circumstances.
Chair: Thank you very much. Time beats us, but you are obviously a blockbuster panel because you have a full audience. Thank you very much, all four of you, for coming along. It has been really useful and welcome in our inquiry.