Infrastructure Planning Blog

This week’s entry looks at the Solar Roadmap, Xlinks, Heathrow, floating offshore wind and chicken manure.

Here Comes the Sun

This week saw the publication of the Solar Roadmap, developed by the Solar Taskforce. It can be found here.

The Roadmap sets out the steps needed for the Government and industry to deliver 45-47GW of solar by 2030, in line with the ambitions set out in the Clean Power Action Plan.

Here are some points of interest:

• To deliver on 2030 targets would require up to 0.4% of total UK land but would power the equivalent of 9 million homes. In addition, up to 35,000 UK jobs could be supported by the solar sector in 2030, up from approximately 17,000 today.
• The Government will conduct a safety study with the aim of unlocking opportunities for plug-in solar. These are solar panel systems which can be plugged into a household socket and are typically used on balconies, garden sheds or terraces. These are not currently permitted in the UK.
• There are a number of actions identified to address the lengthy and complicated process of securing a grid connection for solar projects.
• The Government will continue to assess the potential for construction of solar canopies on outdoor carparks over a certain size (a call for evidence was published earlier this year) and in schools and hospitals. It will also consider further support for floating solar panels on water bodies such as lakes, reservoirs and ponds.
• The Taskforce will now become the Solar Council to oversee progress and identify and address emerging opportunities and threats as they arise.

The document cites the role of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill in speeding up and streamlining the planning process for solar projects, the “new and improved NPSs”, the change in the NSIP threshold from 50MW to 100MW (this will take effect in December 2025 and will mean more solar projects are decided at a local level, potentially resulting in faster decisions) and the replacement of the current system of environmental impact assessments with Environmental Outcomes Reports (“EORs” were introduced by Part 6 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 but are still to be implemented).

Hand in my Pocket

Alanis Morrisette referenced chicken manure in the song of the above name. Here is an important EIA case all about the stuff.

In Caffyn, the court was asked to consider the lawfulness of the approach taken by Shropshire Council to the environmental effects of proposed intensive poultry units (IPU) at a Shropshire farm. The judgement of 17 June is here.

The development site is 9 hectares. There would be 200,000 chickens on site, producing an annual 3,600 tonnes of poultry manure, containing 66,000kg of nitrogen. The leaching of nitrogen from fields to watercourses can have severe implications on water quality. For this reason and due to concerns about residential amenity impacts, it was (eventually) proposed that all manure arising from the poultry buildings would be taken off site to an anaerobic digester or other licensed waste management facility for treatment.

The critical question was whether, following its treatment, the spreading of digestate (which, like raw manure, is not nitrate-free) on third party land needed to be assessed as part of the environmental statement (ES) for the poultry farm development. The court concluded that it did.

In doing so, the court applied the criteria for identifying indirect effects established in Finch, where it was held that the burning of extracted and processed oil were matters capable of assessment in the ES for an onshore oil-extraction project. Those were (1) causation (i.e., are the indirect effects a likely consequence of the development under consideration) and (2) capability of meaningful assessment.

On causation, the court found that the spreading of digestate on third party land was a likely indirect effect of the proposed poultry units and therefore required assessment under the EIA regime. There was no break in the chain of causation between the IPU development and the effects of spreading digestate on third-party land.

As regards capability of meaningful assessment, Fordham J was “… quite unable to say that the environmental effects of spreading digestate on farmland are incapable of meaningful assessment”. He went on to say that meaningful assessment can – and may need to be – at a relatively high level of generality, but in this case the council had not confronted the issue at all.

Accordingly, the planning permission was quashed and the matter remitted to the council for reconsideration. The permission was also quashed for failings in the development’s Habitats Regulations Assessment. This had unlawfully fixated on the in-combination effects of other IPU projects needing planning permission and failed to consider other IPU projects needing environmental permits (but not planning permission).

(It’s a long) Road to Morocco

The Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project would facilitate the import of up to 3.6GW of low carbon electricity from Morocco to the national grid via a 4,000km offshore cable running through Moroccan, Spanish, Portuguese and French Waters before arriving with the UK Exclusive Economic Zone.

Xlinks had previously approached government requesting support for the project, including a bilaterally negotiated 25-year Contract for Difference under the Energy Act 2013, that would have guaranteed a set price per MWh of electricity supplied for the life of the contract.

In a written ministerial statement on 26 June (available here), the government confirmed that it “… has concluded that it is not in the UK national interest at this time to continue further consideration of support for the Morocco-UK Power Project” on the basis that it “… does not clearly align strategically with the government’s mission to build homegrown power here in the UK”.

The UK arm of the project was the subject of a DCO application, which was accepted for examination in December 2024 but has now been withdrawn. The Applicant’s letter of July 1st withdrawing the application is here. In it, the Applicant says that it is progressing plans for an alternative approach to deliver the project which “… may mean changes are needed to our application, which would in turn need further consultation, design review and reassessment of the Project’s impacts”.

Come Fly With Me

The Government this week published a letter to potential promoters of Heathrow expansion. It can be found here.

In it, the Government says that it supports expansion, is inviting proposals for a third runway by 31 July 2025 and that its objective is to have an operational third runway by 2035, with applications for planning consent coming forward in time to enable decisions to be made this Parliament (i.e., August 2029 at the latest, which seems very ambitious).

The letter sets out what information respondents are required to provide as part of their proposals, e.g., relating to costs, timescales, environmental impacts and planned mitigations.

Interestingly, the letter also says that “as the proposals may be used to support the review of the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS), we ask that proposals set out key areas of divergence from requirements specified in the current ANPS where applicable”. The ANPS was designated in 2018 and was the subject of a legal challenge which made it to the Supreme Court (the ANPS was ultimately found to be lawful) but one can imagine that campaign groups will be circling around any amended ANPS.

Wind of Change

Finally, on 24 June 2025, the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) issued a screening and scoping opinion in relation to the Bristol Wind Terminal project. It can be found here. The project is notable in that it aims to tap into floating (as opposed to fixed bottom) offshore wind opportunities in the Celtic Sea, by providing a facility for the storage, manufacture, assembly and operation of floating offshore wind developments. The project requires a Harbour Revision Order under the Harbours Act 1964.

This also follows an announcement by the Crown Estate on 19 June 2025 that Equinor and Gwynt Glas (a joint venture between EDF Renewables and ESB) have been selected as preferred bidders to take forward two of the floating offshore wind farm sites identified in the Celtic Sea Offshore Wind Leading Round 5 process (see the sites labelled “PDA1” and “PDA3” in the image on this page). Both sites have a capacity of up to 1.5GW and will need to be authorised by DCO.

This publication is intended for general guidance and represents our understanding of the relevant law and practice as at July 2025. Specific advice should be sought for specific cases. For more information see our terms & conditions.