I think that the right hon. Member has just put his finger on a very important point. That was flagged up in some of our constituencies in Northern Ireland, where it is used as cover for other applications and other things.
The Sunnica solar power station that has been applied for will take up 600 times more land to deliver the same average power as the local gas power station, so the land use is not good value for money. Those figures encapsulate just how problematic it is to expect any significant power from large solar farms.
The second issue I want to touch on briefly is that large-scale solar developments are a poor use of valuable land. In Ukraine, vast harvests of grain are gathered each year, but it is very unlikely there will be a planting season this year because of the war, and there will certainly be a very narrow harvest period at the end of this year. We get some of our grain from there; it is a bread basket for part of the world. As our country did in the last great war, we need to start setting aside vast swathes of our arable countryside and insist that we become food secure and grow our own food. I am very proud of Northern Ireland food production. With fewer than 40,000 farmers, we feed more than 10 million people in the UK. We have to multiply, develop and increase that.
It is essential that we address the key issue of allowing developers to get away with putting vast industrial plants on good, grade 1, arable land that we could grow grain on, or have cattle graze on, to develop our food security. For me, that is an essential point. The war that Russia is illegally conducting in Ukraine should be a warning signal to us all. We should get ahead of that now by ensuring we have the land planted for next year’s harvest, which is a very important point.
Finally, I want to make a point about human rights abuses. A 2021 report by the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University, entitled “In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labour and Global Solar Supply Chains”, concluded that the solar panel industry in China has high exposure to supply chain compromise by human rights abuses—in other words, child labour and abuse of people working in those plants. We are buying plant equipment to put in this part of the UK, but allowing the abuse of people’s rights in China to do it. We should not allow China, which now dominates the world in these markets, to dominate our valuable production of—