The petition argues that Miliband’s strong advocacy for renewables may undermine his impartiality in making decisions on individual projects, including those involving compulsory purchase.
The issue highlights a growing divide between the UK government’s clean-energy goals and the concerns of rural communities, who are seeing large areas of land being allocated for solar farms and other renewable energy projects, threatening food production and rural identity.
To destroy rural areas and rural life, Miliband’s net zero crusade is going to cost taxpayers and bill payers trillions through levies, subsidies, grid upgrades and potential stranded assets.
A July 2025 Change.org petition, now approaching 6,000 signatures, lays bare a fundamental irony at the centre of British energy policy.
The Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, who has evangelised renewables as “the cheapest and fastest” route to energy independence and prosperity, retains final quasi-judicial authority over Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (“NSIPs”) that exist to realise precisely that vision, prompting the question of whether such certainty can coexist with the impartiality the law demands.
Authored by Catherine Makinson for the Lincolnshire Against Needless Destruction group, the petition invokes the apparent bias test from Porter v Magill [2002] UKHL 67. Would a fair-minded observer conclude there is a real possibility of partiality?
It argues that Miliband’s sustained advocacy, evident in his July 2024 Guardian article, September 2024 Energy UK keynote and July 2025 onshore wind strategy foreword, where renewables are repeatedly framed as the unequivocal economic and security panacea, amounts to predetermination, undermining open-minded assessment of individual applications, including those involving compulsory purchase....<<<Read More>>>....
