Lord Lucas (Con)

My Lords, I very much support Amendments 63 and 106 in this group. I will speak fearlessly to them, because my noble friend Lord Moylan has already put the WD-40 on my set of thumbscrews as a result of previous amendments. It is entirely sensible to put solar panels in places where there is the immediate local demand for electricity when it is sunny. When it is sunny, our trains are running. To have solar panels along rail infrastructure supplies a demand which is entirely local. When the sun is out in a serious way, the rail consumes extra electricity in keeping the carriages cool, so it is an entirely sensible place to put them. Car parks are excellent places to charge your car. They are usually next to supermarkets or other similar places that are using electricity in the daytime. If we are going to generate solar electricity, this is an entirely appropriate place to do it. I would go further than this: I would allow local authorities to have local schemes to encourage solar on all commercial roofs and would allow them to increase the level of business rates payable on roofs that do not have solar. It is ridiculous when you stand on hills above Eastbourne and look at a couple of hundred hectares of commercial estates and there are no solar panels whatever on any of them, but they are all using electricity in the daytime. The difficulties arise from fractured ownership and lease patterns. It is not easy to do, but, if we can produce a substantial incentive that basically says to businesses, “You can either generate some solar in this space or you can pay into a fund to help us to do other things elsewhere”, and if the payment is sufficiently high, I think we will get a move to solar, and that would be a good idea. The alternative is a large solar farm on an ancient marsh in the middle of town. That would be entirely destructive in visual terms and not at all helpful in terms of wildlife and the environment generally. It would be much better if we could have the same size of solar farm on land that is already developed and entirely suitable for it. But we have not got the right structures in place in government to enable that, and I would really like to see that changed.