> > It lacks enough land to feed its population or rear livestock to maintain current consumption patterns and price levels.

> Yet they're pushing to use farmland for solar farms and social housing.

Cities, you may note, never ever make enough food to feed themselves. Always been true, everywhere and everywhen since the invention of the city.

Farmers choosing between cash crops and food crops was literally a game the teachers got the kids to play when I was in school in the 90s. Cash crops, and PV is kinda a cash crop, let you make enough money to buy food. That said, how much money depends on what industry you have to use the power, because nobody else in the world will care for the £ if the UK employment consists entirely of baristas, hairdressers, and Amazon warehouse staff/delivery drivers.

The biggest problem with using farmland for social housing is that a lot of the good farmland is a flood risk.

But the only case where the UK has to care that it doesn't make enough to feed itself is if the economy becomes an autarky, at which point it cannot help but suffer a massive population reduction because it's a small island quite close to the arctic circle which has spent or depleted most of its natural resources, first the wood (1600s-1700s), then the coal (1930s or so), then the fish (1980s or so), then the natural gas (early 2000s).