This is a January 2026 update of a document originally produced in May 2024.  

An analysis is presented of the Agricultural Land Classification (ALC) Grades (1 to 5) that will be taken up by ground-mounted solar installations in England, using information for installations <=50MW from the Renewable Energy Planning Database (REPD) and for NSIP-scale proposals from SolarQ’s own database of 80 projects.

For England as a whole, the proportions of ALC Grades 1 to 5 are 2.72%, 14.2%, 48.3%, 14.1% and 8.4% respectively.

For solar installations across England as a whole, the proportions of ALC Grades 1 to 5 are 3.0%, 19.1%, 65.1%, 9.8% and 0.4% respectively. 

For unequivocal BMV land (Grades 1 and 2) the percentages across the whole country and just within solar installations are 16.9% and 22.0% respectively.  Solar installations seem disproportionately aimed at BMV land.

For unequivocal non-BMV land (Grades 4 and 5) the percentages across the whole country and just within solar installations are 22.5% and 10.2% respectively.  Solar installations seem disproportionately to be avoiding non-BMV land, i.e. they are avoiding the land they are ‘recommended’ to be using.

Developers are simply ignoring recommendations for siting solar installations away from productive agricultural land.  If anything, they appear to prefer BMV to non-BMV land for development.

Although the total amount of land currently used by ground-mounted solar is a fraction of the total available (c. 0.87%, much higher than the frequently quoted figure of 0.1%), some Regions of the country will experience significant losses of best quality agricultural land.  For example, the South-East of England will lose >2.5% of all of its ALC Grade 1 land, the highest percentage loss of any ALC grade across the entire country.

The total amount of land lost to solar will be over 2% in the East Midlands, and over 1% in both the East of England (1.27%) and the Yorkshire and The Humber (1.02%) regions.

The Government’s aim to increase the total amount of operational solar installations up to 75GW by 2050 means that more land will be needed in the future for this renewable energy source. 

Unless the present recommendations are much more actively enforced, or unless new legislation is introduced to protect productive land (e.g. including more land in the BMV category) we will continue to see encroachment of solar on land that is best used for growing food.  A developing food crisis, recently declared of national security concern, will not be averted by losing yet more land to solar.