A SOLAR GOLD RUSH IN THE NEW WILD WEST?

AN APPEAL BY BELCHAMP SAVE OUR SOILS (BSOS)

We are Belchamp Save Our Soils and we are writing to you as fellow campaigners. Like you we are extremely concerned that the mad dash for ground based solar energy, now much in evidence, is being made at the expense of the nation’s food security.

We do not live in your vicinity and would not ordinarily think of applying to join your group but we are all facing a collective crisis. The explosion in planning applications for solar farms located on high quality agricultural land is intensely worrying to say the least and it would seem that this is just the start.

It’s not that there are no checks and balances. These do exist. It’s more about the rules being systematically ignored or watered down. The collective failure of planning authorities to effectively regulate the development of ground based solar farms in the UK is astonishing given the risk it poses to our food production capacity and security. Like you we support the greening of our energy production and believe solar has its place in the mix but only when it is located in the right place. High quality agricultural land is most obviously not the right place.

Some say that the loss of agricultural land due to solar farms is minimal. We would argue that, since we already import half our food, any avoidable loss is shortsighted and in an event the new Government is calling for solar generation capacity to quadruple over the next few years. Where will all this additional capacity go? With the lack of any effective planning controls and the intensive push for using agricultural land due to its highly beneficial characteristics we are set for the loss of food growing land to solar farms to not only continue but to accelerate dramatically.

Like you we have been fighting an application for a large scale (50MW) solar farm on high quality agricultural land. We are located on the Essex/Suffolk border within the Braintree District. The application number is 23/01413/FUL. The site is 56% best and most versatile land and is situated in an area known colloquially as England’s Breadbasket reflecting its extensive production of cereals.

Despite a vigorous opposition campaign over the last 18 months the LPA recently granted this application. However, we believe that they have suppressed evidence and ignored their own planning policies in order to get this application through. Our legal team agree and are supporting us in seeking leave to take our case to judicial review.

This is a big step for us. We are a very small community but we are also very determined. Securing the quashing of a planning decision is difficult to say the least but in this case we believe we have the evidence to convince a judge that the LPA was wrong in granting this application.

However, such an outcome does not guarantee success on its own. We have to prevent a rerun that could leave us back where we started having spent a lot of effort and a lot of money with nothing to show for it. We are therefore working not only to get the LPA’s decision reversed but also to make it impossible or at least unviable for the application to be presented for a second time. Whilst there are no guarantees we again believe we have the evidence to bring this about.

If we were to succeed in our quest we believe it would set a precedent that would benefit other likeminded groups such as yourself and we would be pleased to share our experience such that their chances of success might be enhanced. Case law is the bedrock of the UK justice system which can benefit those claimants who take action following earlier judicial decisions.

Inevitably this legal action will not come cheap and we are going to need help. We have opened a crowdfunding page which has started extremely well. We got to our initial target of £5,000 within 48 hours which has kicked off the action. Now comes the more challenging task of finding the rest.

As part of this programme we are reaching out to the wider community and contacting all the groups we can find that are or have been engaged in schemes to protect our irreplaceable farmland. We appreciate that you and your members are occupied with your own campaign so we are asking only for modest contributions. By spreading our net far and wide we hope to reach our target from a large number of such contributions which will enable us to see this action through to its conclusion whenever and whatever that may be.

To help achieve this we are requesting that you grant us permission to join your group and to post our appeal to your members and will understand if you would like to moderate the content before publication. Anyone who does contribute will receive regular updates as to our progress and will share in our success if we were to win.

You can read more on our Crowdjustice and Facebook pages. We also publish a newsletter that anyone can join by emailing bsos1@icloud.com and putting “Add me” on the subject line.

We thank you for your interest and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Together we can win.

Kind regards