Green light for windfarms as Tories ease their de facto ban

Good morning.

There was a time under the leadership of David Cameron that the Conservative party had the ambition of becoming the “greenest government ever”. But by the early 2010s the party was marred by significant pushback from Conservative MPs against environmental policies that still plagues the government a decade later. One particular point of contention has been the eight-year ban on the development of onshore windfarms in England. Rules that were ushered in under Cameron meant that a local authority in England can reject an application to build an onshore windfarm on the basis of a single objection from a local resident.

A group of MPs, led by former Cop26 president Alok Sharma, have been challenging the government to ease planning restrictions for onshore wind power. Sharma submitted an amendment to the energy bill that ensures communities that have wind turbines located near them would receive direct benefits. The government has said it is willing to back onshore wind where it has local support – though this is a change of tune from last October when Sunak pledged to keep the ban in place.

After much agonising and pressure, the government finally announced that restrictions against onshore windfarms will be loosened, meaning that developments of wind turbines will no longer be stopped because of an objection by one person, a rule that has long been considered undemocratic. Michael Gove has said the new measures will help increase energy security and allow the country to develop a cleaner, greener economy. Some have argued however that changes simply do not go far enough.

For today’s newsletter I spoke to RenewableUK policy manager James Robottom, who specialises in onshore wind advocacy, about why it has been so difficult to move this issue forward.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘Every piece of polling suggests that turbine favourability grows over time’

For those who support the development of wind turbines, the case to scrap the ban could not be clearer: it’s cheaper and faster to build onshore windfarms than offshore, it saves consumers money and crucially it is carbon neutral and therefore key in the fight against the climate crisis. However, there is a clear divide in the government on the issue, with a sizeable number of politicians arguing that onshore wind turbines are unpopular with their voters.

The background

After growing pressure from Conservative MPs, then prime minister David Cameron introduced a series of planning requirements in 2015 that created what many have been described as a de facto ban on the development of new onshore windfarms. “What he ended up doing was adding a single footnote into planning guidance which added two hurdles that onshore wind projects had to go through in order to build new turbines,” Robottom says. Under Cameron’s new rules, all it took for a wind development to be halted was an objection from one person. And there were new responsibilities for local authorities who needed to draw up comprehensive plans that clearly showed all the areas suitable for onshore windfarms before any plans could go ahead and developments had to be included in the authority’s most recent local development plan.

These new requirements, which are not applied to other energy sources, alongside Cameron’s decision to end all subsidies for onshore wind have meant there has been no significant development at all in England.

Between 2016 and 2020, there was a 96% drop in the number of turbines being built in England; last year, only two new turbines were built. As a result of this ban, the UK is lagging significantly behind most countries: a Guardian report revealed that Ukraine had built more onshore wind turbines than England since it was occupied by Russian soldiers.

The Tory crusade against green policies has had an impact on the public’s wallets: “Analysis by Carbon Brief suggests that the planning requirements introduced by Cameron – a 69-word footnote – is estimated to have cost UK bill payers £5.1bn last year, which is around £182 for every household,” Robottom says.

The industry has been decimated in England, with smaller turbine manufacturers pulling down the shutters and larger developers turning their attention to Scotland, Wales and other markets in Europe that are not as hostile to windfarms.

What changed?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 squeezed energy supplies, marking a turning point in the discussion around onshore windfarms, with the war exposing the UK’s lack of energy independence. In response, the government announced a new energy security strategy, which included plans to boost nuclear, wind and hydrogen power. Very little changed however, and by the end of the year, 30 backbench MPs including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss threatened Rishi Sunak with a full-scale rebellion. Sunak was able to head off the mutiny by launching a consultation focusing on how local authorities could further support windfarm applications. The prime minister added that the consultation would also include looking into community benefits like lower energy bills for those living near turbines.

The restrictions remained in place for months after the consultation period closed in March. The same group of MPs intervened again to pressure the government into seeing its own pledge through – and with a number of political crises already brewing for Sunak and a looming general election, this was a battle that the prime minister potentially did not have the political bandwidth to fight.

At the end of the negotiations, the government did make some concessions: local authorities will be allowed to identify locations for new onshore wind developments in more flexible ways and there will be an incentive scheme to make sure local residents see some of the economic benefit of new developments. Still, onshore wind continues to be hamstrung in a way that other infrastructure industries are not.

What do the public really think?

All of this rigmarole and political deadlock is seemingly because of perception as opposed to any ideological opposition or concerns about the material impact of wind turbines, Robottom says. Conservative MPs who do not support the development of onshore wind in England have long said that their stance is a reflection of their constituents.

They do not want to be seen to be supporting a policy that might inconvenience their voter base in the Tory heartlands, who have complained about the noise generated by wind turbines and have said that the tall machines are unsightly and ruin the landscape. However, Robottom says that public opinion is largely in favour of wind turbines: “Every piece of polling suggests that for communities that live close to turbines favourability grows over time.” There has also been a study by Oxford Brookes University, which found that people overestimated opposition to turbines in their area five-fold.

What’s next?

To Robottom the argument for onshore wind is self-evident: it’s more cost-effective, it provides the country energy security and it’s a renewable source of energy. There are also successful examples where communities are heavily involved and engaged in the process and reap the benefits of having wind turbines nearby. The experience for individuals will vary depending on how close the wind turbines are to their homes, and how many there are, but generally speaking there is not a wholesale opposition to them in the way the government has previously suggested there is.

“Ideally, the wind industry does not like any special treatment. It should be treated like any other piece of infrastructure within the planning system,” Robottom says.

The changes brought in by the government do little else but “soften the edges”, Robottom adds. Onshore wind still faces “a planning system that treats it differently to every other energy source or infrastructure project. A lot will be open to interpretation and there are still hurdles to navigate which remain in place. As a result, we’re not going to see investment into new onshore wind at the scale needed to rapidly cut bills and boost energy security.”

What else we’ve been reading

• “I want to be buried with it” – Jill Schildhouse welcomes you to the potty world of Le Creuset cookware supercollectors and finds that each collector has a different reason for acquiring more and more pieces through the years, with some of those reasons running deep. Nazia Parveen, acting deputy editor, newsletters

• It was the hot mic moment of the year (so far) - the education secretary Gillian Keegan managed to make herself the centre of the story about crumbling school buildings when she said: “Does anyone ever say: ‘You know what, you’ve done a fucking good job, because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing’? No signs of that, no?” Marina Hyde unpacks what this 30-second snippet says about the current state of government. Nimo

• Head off on an 18-day, 3,000km loop from Paris to the Atlantic with Joe Zedah to test out whether France’s ban on many domestic flights to encourage a train renaissance is actually working. Nazia

• Arwa Mahdawi writes what we’re all thinking about the Burning Man mess: “I don’t care how exotic the drugs or how interesting the art is: once people such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk show up to your party, there is no longer anything countercultural about it. You are not rebelling against the man. You are the man.” Nimo

• I’m definitely going to be putting ice cubes in my pot plants from now on! Some great tips from Emma Beddington on how to use less water. Nazia

Sport

Football | Jorge Vilda has been sacked after eight years in charge of the Spanish women’s football team, despite winning the World Cup last month. Vilda had come under scrutiny after initially supporting Luis Rubiales, the federation president who was suspended by Fifa from all football-related activity after kissing the player Jennifer Hermoso on the lips during the awards ceremony.

Tennis | Coco Gauff has demolished Jelena Ostapenko 6-0, 6-2 to reach her first US Open semi-final. At no point on Tuesday afternoon did Novak Djokovic ever look threatened in his straightforward 6-1, 6-4, 6-4 win over Taylor Fritz. In the semi-finals Djokovic will face Ben Shelton who a short time ago defeated his compatriot Frances Tiafoe 6-2, 3-6, 7-6 (7), 6-2.

Cricket | England’s Sarah Glenn has called for the introduction of equal pay for women’s cricket umpires, saying she was “surprised” by the huge disparity in fees between the men’s and women’s game revealed by the Guardian on Monday.

The front pages

“Birmingham ‘bankrupt’ as councils suffer cash crisis” says our Guardian splash headline this morning. The Financial Times does that as “Birmingham declares itself bankrupt after equal pay deals drain resources”, while the Metro has “What a fine mess”, about sewage dumping. The cracks are spreading: “NHS staff told to watch out for concrete danger signs”, says the Metro, as the Daily Mirror reports on “Old school ties” – it says £1m from the schools rebuilding fund “went to an IT firm that the education secretary’s hubby works for” (no suggestion of wrongdoing, it caveats). “One million on sickness benefits will have to find a job” says the Daily Mail – on the same topic the Times explains “Mentally ill to work from home in benefits revamp”. The Daily Telegraph applies the brakes: “Back to work drive shelved until 2025” – it says it won’t happen until after the election. “French ‘clearly need to be doing more’ to stop the boats” – that comes from Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, via the Daily Express.

Today in Focus

Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

“These are novels that ooze with emotion, and make you think deeply,” writes Guardian reader Joe of Jess Kitching’s Lucky Number 11 and Sarah Moorhead’s The Treatment in this roundup of the books readers and writers devoured this month.

Novelist Alice Winn shouts out Shola von Reinhold’s “dazzlingly clever” Lote and Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the end of the Soviet Union, Secondhand Time. For something completely different, reader Angela offers The Gran Tour, a writer’s reflections of holidaying with his grandmother.

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

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