Liz Truss is facing a backlash from Jacob Rees-Mogg’s business department over plans to ban solar power from most of England’s countryside.
The Prime Minister and her environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, want to ban solar from about 41% of England’s land area, or about 58% of agricultural land, The Guardian revealed earlier this week.
But her business secretary, Rees-Mogg, is understood to believe it is “unconservative” to tell farmers what they can and cannot do with their land. Her climate minister, Graham Stuart, said on Wednesday he would speak to Defra about the plans, as more ground-based solar is needed to meet renewable energy targets.
In a piece for the Guardian, Rees-Mogg, who has previously decried “climate alarmism”, insists he is convinced of the need to boost renewable energy.
He also unveils new policies including relaxing regulations for businesses to install solar power and giving homeowners subsidies to install panels on their houses.
In the piece, he says he is “not a green energy skeptic,” adding that his department would give “unprecedented support” to renewable energy sources. Rees-Mogg also brands coal mines and oil rigs as “dark satanic mills”, vowing to replace them with wind farms.
On solar, he adds: “We are exploring options to support low-cost finance to help homeowners with the upfront costs of solar installation, permitted development rights to support deployment of smaller-scale solar in commercial settings and design performance standards to further encourage renewables, including solar PV, in new homes and buildings.”
Stuart told the environmental scrutiny committee in parliament on Wednesday that his and Rees-Mogg’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy opposed the ban.
He said his department would speak to Defra about its plans.
“We will work closely with Defra, and the UK energy security strategy has set an expectation for a fivefold increase in solar,” he said. “It is clear that we need significant growth in both ground and rooftop solar to meet this ambition.”
The rebellion comes after reports that Truss berated her cabinet ministers for speaking out against her more unpopular policies, including rumors that she considered linking benefit rises to wages rather than inflation.
Truss’ spokeswoman confirmed on Monday that plans to ban solar from agricultural land are going ahead. This is despite analysis in the Financial Times showing that by doing so, England would lose £20 billion in investment, which critics said would damage her growth agenda.
Asked about The Guardian’s report, Truss’ official spokesman told reporters: “I can point you back to what the Prime Minister said, I think at the beginning of September, when she said she didn’t think we should put solar panels on productive agricultural lands, because obviously as well as the energy security problem, we face a food security problem. So we have to find the right balance.”
The prime minister has always had a personal ambivalence about ground-based solar, falsely claiming when she was environment secretary that solar panels harmed food safety. During her leadership campaign this summer, she dismissed panels as “paraphernalia,” adding: “On my watch, we’re not going to lose areas of our best farmland to solar farms.”
Truss is understood to have the support of Jayawardena, who should submit the plans to change the rural grading system to the department of Rees-Mogg and the department to level up for it to be approved.
He asked his officials to redefine “best and most versatile” land (BMV), which is intended for farming, to include the medium-to-low category 3b, on which most new solar projects are built. Land is graded from 1 to 5, and currently BMV includes classes 1 to 3a. Planning advice says that development on BMV land should be avoided, although planning authorities may take other considerations into account.
Rees-Mogg’s pro-renewables comments may surprise green campaigners who have been alarmed by his previous remarks on climate.
Last month, he told senior staff that Britain “must extract every cubic inch of gas from the North Sea”, a leaked video shows. Critics at the time accused the commerce secretary of “putting his ideology before the climate” and “greenwashing fossil fuels” by prioritizing gas over renewables.
He was also a staunch advocate of fracking, with a leaked email showing that he tried to avoid scrutiny of new energy projects, including those using the controversial method. Sources close to the commerce secretary later explained that he wants to be able to build quickly for all energy methods, including renewables and fracking.
An email to officials, seen by the Guardian, stated that he noted that parliamentary legislation was not subject to judicial review, and could potentially be used to fast-track new projects.
Rees-Mogg also said he would be “delighted” to have fracking in his back garden, and called those who oppose shale gas extraction “luddites” and “socialists”.