We are SABRE – Save Acton Beauchamp’s Rural Environment
Acton Beauchamp, situated in particularly beautiful corner of Herefordshire, is now under threat from a planning application for a large, industrial scale solar panel development.
This is not just a few solar panels in the corner of a field. It will consist of around 40,000 panels, each around 2.5 metres high spread over an area of around 90 acres and surrounded by a 2.8 metre mesh fence with security cameras and infrared lighting. These will be accompanied by 2.6 metre high store rooms, substations and transformers.
It will radically change the currently rural landscape, harm wildlife, disrupt the views and use of footpaths, destroy the peace and tranquility which so many people have come to value and impinge upon the historic setting of listed buildings and field layouts that have remained largely unchanged for over 100 years.
We would like to call upon everyone to join us in opposing this development which will not only damage the local environment for many years to come and render unproductive valuable farmland but will also affect the lives of those who use the footpaths and amenities and who live alongside it.
Although the facility to make online objections using the Herefordshire Council planning portal came to an end at midnight on 27th August 2025, you can still submit your objection by letter or email up until the date upon which the final decision is made. Find out how to make your objection using these methods by going to the “Submit an Objection” link in the menu above.
If you have not already made an objection, we would strongly urge you to do so. Even if you believe that solar panels are the way forward, putting them in the wrong place so that they cause more harm than good is neither green nor logical. Solar only works if it is the right development and in the right place. This is neither. Even the government’s own solar roadmap encourages solar developments to prioritise brownfield sites, contaminated and industrial land, as well as rooftops”. A letter of 17 February 2025 from Ed Milliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, to Richard Fuller MP confirms that:
“Planning policy and guidance makes clear that, wherever possible, developers should utilise brownfield, industrial, contaminated, or previously developed land. Where the development of agricultural land is shown to be necessary, lower-quality land should be preferred to higher-quality land (including ‘Best and Most Versatile’ land). This was the policy of the last government, There are no plans to change this policy”.
