Building man made structures within sight of residents or in places where holiday makers or tourists visit is almost bound to be contentious. My own view is that wind turbines are attractive and whilst not as worthy of a visit as a traditional windmill, I would certainly go out of my way to visit a wind farm if in an area that had one. I also support the very useful contribution made to our economy by such installations as I have previously written. The photograph on the left was taken on the dock road in Bootle and it seems unlikely that this would fail the popularity test that the Conservative Party are now wanting to ask local Councils to set their residents. In the case of this particular windfarm, it is set almost entirely within an urban and industrial area, but from these turbines, you can just about see the offshore Liverpool Bay windfarm shown on the right. If the Conservative Party win the next election, for reasons not fully explained, they are suggesting that the turbine on the left would require local planning consent, and attract no public subsidy, but the much more costly scheme in Liverpool Bay on the right which is far more intrusive to residents wanting a sea view (although in my view no less beautiful), particularly residents that usually vote Tory  would attract subsidies and have its planning consent determined by the Government. I appreciate that the latest Tory Policy has not been set with either Bootle or Blundellsands in mind, but I hope this small example illustrates the rather ill thought through nature of this proposed element for the Conservative manifesto. In practice the real challenge is not the comparison between two nearby wind farms, but the comparison between the clean, if visually dominant wind farms, and dirty and visually dominant nuclear power plants which the Conservatives will continue to subsidise and is not prepared to allow local residents to determine the planning permission for.

The irony of the Tory policy being published within hours of their coalition Government announcing it will take away the power of landowners to object to having their land mined for shale gas is perhaps unfortunate if one was keen for the Conservatives to gain political capital from this clearly populist policy. It is clear that nationally significant power systems need to be dealt with in the same way as one another. If local people are to be given power over windfarms, this should be true of off-shore as well as on-shore schemes. However it should also apply to all other power production facilities including nuclear, gas and coal powered stations, as well as shale gas drilling. Clearly the same approach is not necessary for people such as David Cameron who want to put a small wind turbine on the roof of their houses. That quite rightly should be dealt with by local planning authorities with no need to involve other planners. The same level playing field needs to be applied to subsidies. A subsidy for wind farms, just as for all of the other forms of power production needs to be decided by national governments, but it cannot be based on party political cherry picking. There needs to be a rational and empirical basis for this so that future Liverpool bay schemes are not favoured over future Bootle schemes, and it is clearly wrong for fracking to attract subsidies, yet wind farms to be denied them, just because of a political whim.