A Change.org petition is calling for reforms to address the bias of Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, in approving Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects related to renewables.
The petition argues that Miliband’s strong advocacy for renewables may undermine his impartiality in making decisions on individual projects, including those involving compulsory purchase.
The issue highlights a growing divide between the UK government’s clean-energy goals and the concerns of rural communities, who are seeing large areas of land being allocated for solar farms and other renewable energy projects, threatening food production and rural identity.
To destroy rural areas and rural life, Miliband’s net zero crusade is going to cost taxpayers and bill payers trillions through levies, subsidies, grid upgrades and potential stranded assets.
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Abolish the Altar: Miliband’s Net Zero Fiefdom
By The Rationals, 24 February 2026
A July 2025 Change.org petition, now approaching 6,000 signatures, lays bare a fundamental irony at the centre of British energy policy.
The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, who has evangelised renewables as “the cheapest and fastest” route to energy independence and prosperity, retains final quasi-judicial authority over Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (“NSIPs”) that exist to realise precisely that vision, prompting the question of whether such certainty can coexist with the impartiality the law demands.
Authored by Catherine Makinson for the Lincolnshire Against Needless Destruction group, the petition invokes the apparent bias test from Porter v Magill [2002] UKHL 67. Would a fair-minded observer conclude there is a real possibility of partiality?
It argues that Miliband’s sustained advocacy, evident in his July 2024 Guardian article, September 2024 Energy UK keynote and July 2025 onshore wind strategy foreword, where renewables are repeatedly framed as the unequivocal economic and security panacea, amounts to predetermination, undermining open-minded assessment of individual applications, including those involving compulsory purchase.
The petition calls for targeted reforms, recusal from relevant cases, enhanced parliamentary scrutiny or amendments to the Planning Act 2008. It endorses net zero as a “worthy” goal while insisting that quasi-judicial duties under the Localism Act 2011 require detachment from preconceived ministerial conviction.
This insistence on detachment stands in ironic contrast to the very advocacy that has galvanised rural opposition, where communities perceive their landscapes as collateral in a policy presented as universally beneficial.
This modest yet persistent grassroots campaign, advancing through parish networks, village groups and regional opposition rather than institutional channels, illuminates a growing divide between Westminster’s clean-energy certitude and the tangible burdens borne by rural communities.
The Planning Act 2008 sought to expedite infrastructure of national importance. Yet it entrusts one minister with sweeping discretion to alter landscapes, often with scant effective restraint.
The outcomes are increasingly visible.
Lincolnshire has approved eight solar NSIPs in the past eighteen months, with nine more awaiting determination. The Fosse Green Energy scheme south of Lincoln illustrates the pattern, proposing to cover over 3,000 acres with panels for up to sixty years and affecting villages from Thorpe on the Hill to Bassingham.
Lincolnshire County Council has objected on grounds of irreversible industrialisation, productive soil loss and erosion of rural identity. Campaigners warn that such projects contribute to a broader threat, estimating up to 89,975 acres of best and most versatile farmland at risk across the county from large cumulative solar developments.
The same dynamic manifests in Northamptonshire with the Green Hill Solar Farm (EN010170), a 500 MW proposal spanning approximately 2,965 acres (1,200 hectares) of greenbelt, best and most versatile farmland, and rural countryside, comparable in total footprint to Heathrow Airport. This multi-site scheme extends across a roughly 20 km radius, encompassing areas from Lavendon to the south and Earls Barton to the north, among other parishes, and includes solar arrays, battery storage and mitigation land.
Now under examination at the Planning Inspectorate, with submissions due by 27 March 2026, the project has drawn strong objections from local councils and residents, who cite greenbelt erosion, industrial-scale rural incursion, threats to food production and profound changes to scenic vistas. One representation posed the question plainly, “Is this really necessary?”, a view echoed by Northamptonshire County Councillor Adam Brown, who warned that once the countryside is lost, it is lost forever.
These local episodes are not aberrations but manifestations of broader structural forces. The pattern is unmistakable across the East Midlands and Yorkshire regions, eight large-scale solar NSIPs have been approved in East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone over the past eighteen months, with at least nine more in the pipeline.
Key examples include the Tillbridge Solar Farm (approved 14 October 2025, 500 MW on some 3,000 acres near Gainsborough, the UK’s largest solar NSIP at the time), Gate Burton Energy Park (approved 12 July 2024, 500 MW with battery storage), Mallard Pass Solar Project (approved 12 July 2024; 350 MW across Lincolnshire and Rutland), Cottam Solar Project (approved 5 September 2024, approximately 600 MW straddling Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire) and East Yorkshire Solar Farm (approved May 2025, 400 MW).
One might reasonably ask whether this accelerated succession, celebrated in policy circles as evidence of decisive progress, reflects genuine case-by-case impartiality or bears the imprint of a predetermined national mission, ironically accelerating rural “industrialisation” despite guidance intended to protect prime farmland.
The All-Party Parliamentary Group on flooding and agricultural resilience projects a 23 – 25 per cent reduction in UK farmland by 2050 from competing demands, potentially diminishing per capita domestic food output by up to 39 per cent.
Given global uncertainty and extreme geopolitical volatility and Britain’s reliance on imports for roughly half its calories, such losses raise acute resilience concerns that are scarcely alleviated by claims that solar occupies a mere 0.1 per cent of land. Despite departmental guidance to prioritise non-prime sites, the clustering of approvals lends weight to the petition’s contention that ministerial predisposition shapes both location and outcome.
This predisposition assumes greater irony against the statutory and rhetorical context. The Climate Change Act 2008 fixed the 2050 net zero target; the current government has accelerated it with a 2030 clean power ambition that Miliband has pursued with notable fervour. His public statements, renewables as “the cheapest and fastest” means to energy independence, align seamlessly with policy yet sit awkwardly alongside the requirement for case-by-case impartiality.
The 2020 Westferry Printworks case underscores how ministerial words and actions can render decisions liable to quashing on bias grounds, irrespective of pecuniary interest.
The fiscal dimension deepens the irony still further, as these proliferating NSIP commitments, each locking in significant infrastructure and land use, amplify the scale of projected expenditures. The Climate Change Committee now projects net costs from 2025 to 2050 at £108 billion (under 0.2 per cent of annual GDP), a striking reduction from prior estimates, attributed by critics to methodological sleight-of-hand involving optimistic assumptions on technology costs and borrowing.
In contrast, David Turver’s 13 January 2026 Institute of Economic Affairs briefing, drawing on National Energy System Operator pathways, estimates gross expenditures of £7.6 trillion for the preferred Holistic Transition route (exceeding £9 trillion with residual carbon levies), or £7.2 – 10 trillion in less ambitious scenarios.
Assumptions, such as offshore wind at £53/MWh by 2035, have drawn scrutiny, with coverage in corporate media expressing concern, while rebuttals from LSE Grantham and others defend the methodology but sidestep demands for comprehensive gross transparency.
These figures are compounded by warnings that the 2030 clean power target may prove unattainable without substantial additional investment or trade-offs.
A February 2026 Wood Mackenzie report indicated an extra £75 billion in renewables spending could be required by decade’s end to avoid missing the goal, while the Tony Blair Institute’s analysis the same month criticised rushed decarbonisation for risking entrenched high energy prices, contrary to pre-election promises of bill reductions, and for poorly sequenced implementation that heightens costs and vulnerabilities.
Such assessments introduce a further layer of irony. Commitments framed as the pathway to unassailable affordability and security now confront warnings that the very speed of deployment may necessitate billions more in unforeseen expenditure or force difficult trade-offs.
These trillions represent cumulative liabilities for taxpayers and bill payers through levies, subsidies, grid upgrades and potential stranded assets. The Office for Budget Responsibility identifies the transition as a principal long-term fiscal pressure.
This fiscal reality sharpens the irony still further. A minister who proclaims renewables’ unassailable economic superiority presides over a consenting regime that commits vast resources and landscapes to that pathway, even as credible analyses expose far higher costs and communities register deepening resistance.
Yet this accumulating evidence of costs, risks and landscape impacts has elicited surprisingly limited scrutiny at Westminster, where the clean-energy imperative continues to command broad consensus.
Parliamentary response has been muted. Hansard records no major debates on constraining the Department or Miliband’s NSIP role though isolated interventions persist, such as Conservative MP Victoria Atkins January 2026 criticism of shire “industrialisation” and Reform UK’s 2025 manifesto proposal to abandon net zero for £30 billion in annual savings.
Public sentiment evolves in parallel. A February 2026 King’s College London/Ipsos poll indicates support for achieving net zero before 2050 declining to 29 per cent (from 54 per cent in 2021), with outright scepticism or rejection rising to 26 per cent (from 9 per cent).
Amid this convergence of multi-trillion commitments, irreplaceable farmland losses and ministerial conviction, the petition’s insistence on impartiality stands as a necessary corrective. It presents a measured challenge to net zero’s institutional architecture, not repudiation of the objective, but implementation of safeguards, independent adjudication, rigorous bias scrutiny and transparent cost auditing to protect decisions from the appearance of predetermination.
Net zero is elevated to the status of an unassailable national priority, yet rural communities are asked to make profound, often permanent sacrifices of landscape and productive capacity on its altar, in service of a policy whose economic premises face sustained, evidence-based scrutiny.
These sacrifices on the altar of net zero, measured in irreplaceable acres across proliferating NSIPs and liabilities borne by the public in trillions, render demonstrable neutrality at the highest level indispensable for maintaining trust, ensuring legal defensibility and securing enduring legitimacy.
The petition, modest in scale yet rigorously constructed, distils this imperative and merits serious consideration. To proceed without safeguards risks the irreversible erosion of rural living and the very character of the British countryside. In an endeavour of such magnitude, procedural fairness is not an incidental virtue, it is foundational.
Readers may wish to review the petition here at Change.org
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