TFA demands justice for solar-displaced farmers
© Tim Scrivener Tenant farmers who have been displaced by solar developments and left out of pocket need justice, the Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) has told the UK government.
More than 1.5m homes across the country now have solar installed, and almost 3GW of nationally significant solar projects have been approved since 2024 – nearly three times the number in the previous 14 years combined.
The UK Solar Roadmap (pdf), issued on 30 June by the UK government, aims to see significant increases in solar deployment by 2030, including current solar deployment from more than 18GW to 45-47GW by 2030, with scope to exceed the 47GW upper limit.
See also: UK-wide protests held against large-scale solar farms
However, not everyone shares the government’s enthusiasm for solar farms.
Writing to the ministers for energy, farming, and housing and planning, the TFA highlighted that tenant farmers often lost their livelihoods as a result of solar projects.
While the TFA was pleased to see the UK government saying it wanted to ensure “adequate and fair” compensation for tenant farmers displaced from their land, details of how it planned to do so must be made available.
“It is necessary to define what is ‘adequate and fair’ compensation,” wrote TFA chief executive George Dunn.
The TFA view, he highlighted, was that it must equate to the compensation necessary to cover the actual loss of the tenant farmer to their business, their home and their livelihood.
This could be taken forward in several ways, including providing statutory advice to local planning authorities and planning inspectors considering planning appeals, to ensure that compensation was indeed “adequate and fair”.
The same principle of consideration should be applied before ministers approved any proposals as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, which .
“A more complete approach would be to reform the provisions of agricultural tenancy legislation to ensure that the compensation provisions for tenants who lose land to development are defined,” wrote Mr Dunn.
Fair compensation
Solar Energy UK, which helped to create the Solar Roadmap, agreed that compensation to tenant farmers should be adequate and fair.
Chief executive Chris Hewett said: “Good solar projects already offer this, if needed.
“We would be happy to work with stakeholders and the government to review the existing framework set by the Agricultural Holdings Act 1986 and ensure that it is applied consistently.”
However, he added that financial transactions were ultimately a matter between landowners and their tenants, rather than solar developers.