CommunityPlanningAlliance 🦇🦎

A solar farm just opened where a beef farm used to be. This is a real sentence about a real place. In Lincolnshire, near Glentworth, on land that grew British food for six hundred years. 1,214 hectares of grazing pasture and cropland, the size of Heathrow Airport, now under panels for the next forty years. It is called Tillbridge Solar. It was approved in October 2025. The locals were against it. The local council was overruled by central government. The farmer who used to graze cattle on that land will not be grazing cattle on that land in your lifetime. Down the road, Springwell Solar got the nod the same month. 1,280 hectares. The largest in the country. Same story. Beef and arable, gone. This is happening everywhere. CPRE found that 59% of England's biggest solar farms are on productive farmland. In one Lincolnshire district, 7% of the land is now solar panels. Three solar farms, Sutton Bridge, Goosehall, and Black Peak, are built entirely on the highest grade of agricultural land we have. Now here is the part nobody mentions at the dinner party. The roofs of the warehouses on the A1 are empty. The supermarket distribution centres are empty. The Amazon sheds, the MoD car parks, the industrial estates outside every town in England, all empty. CPRE's own numbers show that putting panels on the roofs we already have would meet the entire 2035 solar target on its own. The panels are not going on the roofs. The panels are going on Lincolnshire because leasing one field from one farmer is easy, and leasing a thousand roofs from a thousand owners is hard. The shortcut is the pasture. You will not be told to stop eating beef. You will simply find that the farm that produced it is now a power station, and the beef in the supermarket has come from Kansas, and it costs more, and the cow is no longer in the field, because the field is no longer a field. Cover the roofs. Leave the pasture.

No one is saying the £125m bat tunnel alone is the reason HS2 costs north of £100bn. But, along with HS2 specific big issues (route, speed), it is a perfect example of a system wide problem. Gold plating, process over outcomes, legal risk and delay increase costs at each stage