Sarah Jones

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I cannot comment on the individual case in his constituency, of course. But of course when developers are applying for planning permission, they go through a series of criteria and have to adhere to a series of criteria, whether that is for the development of smaller solar plants, where it goes through local authorities, or whether it is through the nationally significant infrastructure project process. The solar taskforce is looking at all these issues as well. We are making sure we are mindful of all of the range of issues that we need to consider when we are looking at bringing infrastructure into communities. I will come to this later, but it is really important to say that we want to do this with local communities—with consultation of local communities and with consideration of what other options are available to us as well. That will continue. Solar is one of the cheapest sources of power available to us, which is an important consideration when we are looking at the full range of options that we have between us. We are setting a target for around 45 GW to 47 GW of solar power by 2030. That is up from the 17 GW that we have today and it is a substantial increase. I want to tackle the issue that a number of Members mentioned—the rooftop versus ground-mount issue. The hon. Member for South Cotswolds is right to talk about how we need to be going further to make sure we are putting solar panels on our roofs, and to ask what Government can do to encourage that. We are bringing in new building standards to ensure that all newly built houses and commercial buildings are fit for a net zero future. We expect those standards to encourage the installation of solar panels on new developments. We are issuing later this year a call for evidence on the construction of solar on outdoor car parks. The reconvened solar taskforce is focusing on rooftop solar, and further actions to increase deployment will be set out in the road map this spring. I was talking to one of our big mayoral authorities yesterday about the power purchase agreements that people could potentially have in this space. If people look at public sector roofs and the collaboration they could have across some of our transport infrastructure and some of our public sector infrastructure, they could do more ambitious projects when it comes to solar, and of course we want to push that as much as we can. If we can put solar panels on rooftops, that is what we want to do. But we consider that we need a mix of both: we need ground-mounted and rooftop panels to get to the numbers that we want to see. Let me turn to the planning system. All proposed solar projects are subject to a rigorous planning process, which considers the interests of local communities, as I said to the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller).