Conservatives to take onshore wind farms out of Planning Act regime

Angus Walker picture-13This entry reports on an announcement about onshore wind farms by the Conservative Party this morning.

Background

At the moment, any onshore wind farm that has a capacity of more than 50 megawatts must use the Planning Act 2008 regime to be authorised. As a standard turbine is around 3MW capacity, that works out at 17 turbines or more.

According to this wikipedia page, there are just two onshore wind farms in England with over 50MW capacity at the moment, at Scout Moor in Lancashire and Little Cheyne Court in Kent. Since the Planning Act came into force in March 2010, another two applications have been made for onshore windfarms, both in Wales - Brechfa Forest West and Clocaenog Forest.

The government has made a couple of recent moves to make the authorisation of onshore wind farms more difficult - first, invoking the Localism Act power to require pre-application consultation on wind farms of more than two turbines or where one is more than 15 metres high (i.e. virtually all of them), and secondly Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles MP has recently extended the power he granted himself in October to call in wind farm applications for his own determination from a six-month period to 18 months.

Announcement

This morning the Conservative Party have issued a press release which first says that should they be elected at the next election they will scrap subsidies for onshore wind farms, but goes on to say that they will return decisions on onshore wind farms to local control, i.e. they will remove them from the scope of the Planning Act regime.

Analysis

I think this is the first time the Planning Act has been used as a political tool, but it probably won't be the last. The proposal won't have much effect given the small proportion of onshore wind farms that are above the Planning Act threshold, but underlines the Conservatives' ambivalence towards onshore wind - being officially in favour of it and unofficially against it. Judging by the timing, the election that the announcement is intended to influence is not next May's general election but this May's European Parliament (and local) election.

It is interesting that the combined effect of taking onshore wind farms out of the Planning Act regime and then calling in applications when they are made to local authorities would be to transfer decisions on such projects from Liberal Democrat Secretary of State Ed Davey MP to Conservative Secretary of State Eric Pickles MP.

If a week is a long time in politics, a year is even longer, and we shall see what the parties' manifestos acually say about infrastructure planning when the time comes.