Yardley Road Solar Farm Planning Application

UPDATE

A case officer has now been allocated for the Yardley Road Solar Farm planning application (2025/2767/MAF – Solar Farm)  and the deadline for responses from the public has been extended to 21 August 2025.

Use this link to comment on the application.

Potterspury Parish Council has been granted an extension until 12 September, which gives the council time to discuss the matter at our next meeting on 10 September.

When we have discussed this project over the past few years, councillors have expressed concern over

• The size and scale of the proposal across 12 fields, including the visual impact. The area is almost twice the size of the built environment (the village confines) of Potterspury.
• The loss of productive farmland
• The loss of biodiversity
• The detrimental effect on local footpaths and rights of way
• The noise produced by the transformers and inverters
• Flood risk and drainage – Potterspury has suffered flooding caused by run-off from the fields at the top of Meeting Hill in 2020. The drainage assessment says: ‘soil conditions at the site and within the surrounding area are described as lime-rich loamy and clayey soils with impeded drainage’.
• The distance from the site to the grid connection at Bradwell Abbey some 10 km away – installation of cabling will undoubtedly cause some traffic ‘hiccups’.

All the planning documents are available to view on the WNC planning portal here.

The Design and Access Statement provides an overview of the whole project, including

• The size (70 hectares – it will generate enough electricity to power c.18,482 homes per annum)
• The length of time for construction and how the site will be accessed (estimated nine months, with access from the A508, not through the villages of Yardley or Potterspury). There will be a new access from Beech House Drive on to the Yardley Road
• How the solar farm will be connected to the grid (via newly installed underground cables which will track from the fields via Furtho, along Poundfield Road and south down the A5, via Stony, Wolverton and Greenleys to Bradwell Abbey)
• Landscape mitigation proposals, such as establishing new hedgerows and infill planting.

The proposal will be discussed in detail by the Parish Council on 10 September in the Village Hall at 7.30pm. As always, members of the public are welcome to attend the meeting.