Yorkshire farming family calls for fair compensation in solar panel projects on farms
Tenant farmers facing losing their land to a solar scheme have urged the Government to honour its pledge to ensure they are not “taken advantage of” and start offering more than statutory compensation.
The call from the Sturdy family of Malton comes as the Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) this week reiterated its demand for urgent government action over the mounting number of solar developments displacing tenant farmers with little or no compensation.
In a letter to Farming Minister Daniel Zeichner, the TFA highlighted what it describes as a broken promise by Sir Keir Starmer, who told the 2023 NFU conference that solar farms must not be created “by taking advantage of our tenant farmers”.
The TFA said the government’s post-election planning decisions have been at odds with Sir Keir’s pledge.
Refusals by authorities including North Yorkshire Council, based in part on the impact on tenant farmers, have been overturned at appeal or by ministers as the government seeks to increase solar energy generation from 16.6GW to 47GW by 2030.
Welcoming a government commitment in its recent Solar Roadmap to ensure compensation for displaced tenant farmers to be “adequate and fair”, the TFA called for formal guidance to be issued to councils and planning inspectors to ensure tenant farmers' rights are properly considered.
Earlier this year a government planning inspector approved Harmony Energy’s plan to develop a solar farm across land the family of tenant farmers Robert and Emma Sturdy had invested in off Great Sike Road, Malton, since 1971, around 60 per cent of which is BMV.
Mrs Sturdy said the statutory compensation they would be likely to receive - in the region of six times their annual rent – would not recognise tenants’ real losses.
She said: “Even though the planning inspector said the damage to our business was exceptional, he never took any steps to mitigate the damage to us.
"This Solar Roadmap has highlighted the industry and government recognise solar farms can cause to agricultural 1986 tenants like us and they want to ensure there is fair and adequate compensation to tenants.
"However, with us they haven’t taken any steps to do that, because their government has approved it without even mentioning compensation.”
The TFA’s letter also called on Mr Zeichner to confirm the timeline for implementing the Solar Roadmap provisions and to review if whether the fair compensation principle could be applied to planning decisions already taken.
Mrs Sturdy added: ”The government needs to lay out how adequacy and fairness in compensation is going to be assessed.”
The appeals for action come as analysis by countryside charity CPRE found 59 per cent of the country’s 38 operational solar developments generating over 30MW are situated on farmland, with 31 per cent of the total land covered by panels classed as best and most versatile (BMV) for agriculture.
CPRE is pressing for a target for at least 60 per cent of new solar capacity to come from rooftops, car parks, and brownfield sites and ban solar development on the most fertile farmland.
Recent months have seen a litany of proposals to develop solar arrays on Yorkshire farmland, some of which is classed as BMV.
These include 157 acres near Beningbrough, north of York, 254 acres near Wickersley, South Yorkshire, 148 acres at Cawood, near Selby, while May saw a solar farm covering 3,155 acres of farmland approved near Howden.