Our farmland is facing a ‘land crunch’ as solar, housing and other demands compete for space. Yesterday (Wednesday 18 March), the government published England’s first Land Use Framework, which it claims will play a central role in delivering food security, clean energy, nature restoration and new homes over the coming decades.
Here’s our response:
Devon CPRE Chairman, Steve Crowther says:
“Devon CPRE was warning farming communities throughout last year that the government was planning to decimate our farmland, and the Land Use Framework they have just published confirms it. 10% of land is to be taken – 1% to go under solar and wind energy developments, and a further 9% for re-wilding, nature and habitat creation. That’s a total of more than 2 million acres of farmland earmarked, before you add in the 400,000 acres scheduled to go under housing.
The Secretary of State says that there will be enough farmland left to ‘maintain domestic food production’. But with our food self-sufficiency at 58% overall, a rapidly expanding population and escalating global insecurity, ‘maintaining’ is not what we need. We urgently need a radical overhaul of our attitude to farming and food supply, to prioritise homegrown food production.
Here in Devon, we have some of the finest land for livestock production anywhere in the world. Yet both here and in the East Anglian breadbasket, we are being inundated with developers’ applications to build ever-bigger solar arrays, to ‘farm’ the subsidies that the government uses to make solar more lucrative than growing food.
All of our solar energy needs by 2050 could be delivered through a focused programme of rooftop conversion and use of brownfield and public land; but while the government makes it more profitable to grab cheap farmland instead, that’s where the speculators will build. Meanwhile, the cherished landscapes on which Devon’s largest economic driver – tourism – depends are threatened with disappearing under black glass and steel.
This is our ‘Green land’ – hands off.”