Company accused of damaging Gwent Levels shortlisted for environmental award

Martin Shipton

An environmental group has condemned the shortlisting of a company for a top planning award despite its entry having failed to mitigate damage done by a recently built solar plant.

Lighthouse Development Consulting, which has bases in Cardiff and Exeter, is on a shortlist of six for the “Excellence in Planning for the Natural Environment” category in the Royal Town Planning Institute’s (RTPI’s) prestigious annual awards.

The winner is due to be announced at an event in London on November 26.

But Friends of the Gwent Levels have pointed out that the firm’s project – Llanwern Solar Farm – has been criticised for damaging the Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on which it is located.

‘Exceptional projects’

According to the RTPI, the award for which Lighthouse has been nominated “celebrates exceptional projects that actively contribute to preserving, improving, or rejuvenating our natural resources”.

On its website, Lighthouse states: “The key challenges were adapting to a new consenting process and addressing the significant environmental constraints including SSSI, Historic Landscape, Flood Zone 3, Valued Landscape, adjacent SPA [Special Protection Area] and SAC [Special Area of Conservation] and an area of breeding common cranes.”

The company goes on to claim that it provided a solution by submitting a “comprehensive EIA [Environmental Impact Assessment] prepared alongside a very strong technical case, robust planning and strategy to adapt to the new untested DNS [Development of National Significance] process, excellent advocacy at the hearing and comprehensive community consultation.”

‘Biodiversity benefit’

But a spokesperson for Friends of the Gwent Levels said: “In 2018, Lighthouse Development Consulting was given permission to build a huge solar farm – Llanwern – on the Gwent Levels SSSI; permission was granted based on the promise to deliver biodiversity benefit through a number of mitigation schemes.

“These mitigation schemes were approved by the inspector, Newport Council, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) and ultimately the Welsh Government. After three years of operation it’s clear that the developers have failed to fulfil their promises; post-construction monitoring of the site reveals a number of key areas where the SSSI is in a worse state than it was before the solar farm arrived.

“Newport council recently refused a partial discharge of conditions to the developer for this very reason.

“The developer has been asked to find ‘contingency’ measures to put things right but no one so far has established what these contingency measures might be. The developer is also in discussion with NRW to try and work out what to do to remedy the lamentable situation.

“Meanwhile Lighthouse has been shortlisted in the Royal Town Planning Institute awards for Excellence in Planning for the Natural Environment, specifically for ’significant environmental recovery’ at the Llanwern solar farm.

“The very same Lighthouse has been aggressively pursuing approval for another major solar farm on the Gwent Levels with an almost identical set of mitigation measures to the ones they offered at Llanwern. We say aggressively because the application was turned down twice, so they took the Welsh Government to the High Court and won (actually the Welsh Government didn’t offer any defence) and they have resubmitted. There will be some formal hearings soon to determine that application.

“Lighthouse was the subject of some discussions between Newport and NRW early on in the operational phase of the Llanwern solar farm when it failed to provide post-construction monitoring in a timely fashion. Newport council were of a mind to ‘quietly file it away’ at that point. However, it seems that when the post-construction monitoring report of December 2023 came out, even a hard-pressed local authority couldn’t ‘quietly file away’ the fact that mitigation had clearly failed on a SSSI within their jurisdiction.

“The whole business of mitigation measures for solar farms on a SSSI is greenwashing on an audacious scale. The Gwent Levels is currently threatened by at least six major solar farm applications at various stages of the planning process. All these applications claim that they will deliver biodiversity benefit. The only hard evidence we have of a solar farm on the Levels is that it DOESN’T deliver biodiversity benefit at all. This evidence is based on the post-construction monitoring of the site – a prerequisite of planning approval being given – by a third party environmental consultancy firm.

“The idea that the developers are publicly declaring ’significant environmental recovery’ when in fact they’ve caused actual damage, to habitats and populations of red-listed species, for example, suggests extraordinary arrogance – an arrogance that comes perhaps from decades of developers causing environmental damage and rarely being held to account.

“Nature is in freefall in the UK and one of the reasons is the planning system which ignores the appeals of ENGOs [environmental non-governmental organisations] and local environmental objectors and allows developers free rein to destroy habitats – as long as they tick some ‘mitigation’ boxes along the way.”

Monitoring report

The post-construction monitoring report on the Llanwern Solar Farm contains a number of statements that strongly suggest a failure of mitigation measures, including:

* There appeared to have been chemical control of thistles in array area 1, to the detriment of the shrill carder bee as the weakening of the thistles had reduced foraging opportunities.

* The “Lapwing Mitigation Area” was not found to support breeding lapwing in 2023.

* Counts of shrill carder bees on the day of the survey had declined by 63% between 2017 and 2023 in array area 1. In contrast counts had increased in array areas 2 and 3 from 2017 to 2023 but remained in low numbers overall. The survey in 2023 was the first count of the mitigation area where two individuals were recorded.

* The number of bat species recorded at each location has not shown a trend with time but the number of passes has greatly decreased in the array areas in the post-construction years compared to the baseline survey.

*Habitat enhancement has been undertaken. Effects of solar panels is [sic] being monitored. Yet to see a population increase [in terrestrial invertebrates].

* No record of cranes breeding in Wales in 2023.

* Only one of the boxes was occupied by bats – a single common pipistrelle in array area 1.

* Bat diversity remains stable but activity has decreased in the array areas.