Sir – It is right that our worsening food self-sufficiency comes from having more mouths to feed. That makes it even more important to stop covering land which could have been growing food with solar panels.

It is right too that there have been trials of batteries capable of storing solar energy produced on your roof during the hours of daylight for you to use at night, and there are experiments with new kinds of solar panels which may be able to store electricity for a week or two. Whether either of these possibilities will become viable on a large scale is another matter, or have the capacity to store solar energy all the way from the height of summer, when it is mainly produced, to the depths of winter when it is mainly needed.

Hopefully they will. But that is still no reason to cover viable agricultural land with solar panels when there are existing commercial and industrial roofs capable of supporting many multiples of the solar capacity the Government aims to provide.

As with all developers, it is easier and quicker, and more profitable, to use greenfield agricultural land. That does not make it the right thing to do.

Michael Tyce
Campaign to Protect Rural England, Oxfordshire