‘Wild west’ planning rules threaten to turn countryside cottages into solar islands.

For Mandy Goodhand and Stephanie Johnson-Mansley, it looked like the retirement cottage they’d always dreamed of. The Telegraph has the story.

Howell Fen Farm, a remote but beautiful 1850s Lincolnshire farmhouse, is surrounded by green fields and wildlife and offered lots of room for the animal refuge they’d always wanted.

But 15 months after spending £380,000 buying the property, plus another £80,000 on refurbishments, a knock on the door from a local farmer ruined their rural idyll.

The farmer, owner of the surrounding fields, told them he and two other farmers had signed their land over to a solar developer – meaning they would soon be surrounded in a sea of black glass panels.

There was, he said, nothing they could do about it and no chance of compensation.

“We came here largely for the wildlife – we also have hares, deer, wild birds, badgers – and beautiful landscapes,” says Goodhand.

“The developers told us they were installing solar panels up to our boundary, plus fences, and there was nothing we could do about it, nor any chance of compensation. The wildlife and everything else we loved it for will be gone – and no one will buy our house.”

The scale of the planned Beacon Fen solar farm next to Goodhand and Johnson-Mansley’s property is huge, covering more than 1,300 acres of mostly top quality farmland, according to documents submitted to the Planning Inspectorate.

It means Goodhand and Johnson-Mansley, living on its southern edge, will be surrounded by the 15ft-high panels on three sides – with a road on the other.

For the Beacon Fen developers, Low Carbon, a private investment company based near Pall Mall in central London, it means 40 years of profits. Farmers, who live out of sight of the panels, will also be entitled to decades of rental income estimated at over £1,000 an acre.

Such plans highlight what some see as an emerging “wild west” approach to the solar planning scramble hitting England’s most rural counties.

It’s a scramble boosted by a near-total lack of planning rules or guidelines – allowing solar developers to buy or lease vast tracts of fertile green farmland and cover them in solar panels.

Read the full story here.