THE CROWN ESTATE’S MARINE ROUTEMAP

The Crown Estate’s Marine Routemap – The Rush to Develop Offshore Power

Climate Change, Marine Planning and Licensing, Sustainability and the Environment

By the NFFO

This week, the Crown Estate has laid out its vision and priorities for the future of Britain’s seas and it is clear that wind farm development is paramount. The rush to industrialise the marine environment is picking up pace. Meaningful dialogue with genuine stakeholders is the only thing that can prevent harm to the fishing industry and coastal communities.

The Crown Estate has released an ambitious new route map for the development of Britain’s seas. This, and the ‘Future of Offshore Wind’ report that accompanies it, envisage a seascape radically changed from what we have known until now.

Their vision – of up to 140GW of offshore wind farms being installed or planned by 2040 – calls for tens of thousands of square kilometres of the UK’s waters to be industrialised.

This is not a project to make new use of unproductive space, however. Although they may look empty at a glance, our seas are already crowded with activity. Much of the vast area that the Crown Estate is considering leasing out for development is used to produce food.

Fishermen have worked Britain’s seas for thousands of years. In recent decades they have had to make way for many new industries that have laid claim to their traditional grounds, but the latest proposals from the Crown Estate have the potential to disrupt fishing on a scale beyond anything previously imagined.

It is important not to overreact. The maps that the Crown Estate has published are shocking, but they do not represent the total space that will be developed. Having laid down this marker, they will now embark on a process of refining the areas, before settling on the particular sites that they will offer out for lease. They have promised to talk to other sea users, fishermen included, understand the places that are most important to them. They did this ahead of the recent wind farm leasing round in the Celtic Sea and the process succeeded in identifying and avoiding the places where it would be most harmful to the fishing industry to see turbines installed. The cooperation between the Crown Estate and fishermen was unprecedented and the outcome was a positive one.

Nevertheless, the scale of what is proposed now is an order of magnitude beyond what has gone before. We will soon run out of sea space that can be industrialised without curtailing our capacity to produce food. Those conversations are going to get a lot more difficult as we go forward.

We can’t ignore the real need for discussions like this. Britain faces a fundamental problem: it consumes more energy than it can sustainably produce. Climate change is a reality and lower carbon sources of electricity generation must be found if our way of life is to continue. Many things will have to change to accommodate this and we would be naïve if we did not accept that this will include how we use our seas.

The enormity of the threat and the halo with which it crowns any new project or technology that promises to tackle it must not blind us to more mundane motivations, though. Industrialising Britain’s seas is not a charitable project for the greater good of the nation. It is a commercial proposition, to be enacted mostly by foreign-owned multinational corporations, for profit. British consumers will pay for the electricity they receive from the wind farms at prices that have soared in recent years. The Crown Estate itself does not give land away: it leases it out, generating astonishing profits in the process. To be sure, much of the profit made returns to the government, but the Crown Estate is not a department of the civil service and so a substantial sum ends up in private hands too, including those of the King. Last year, the profits from offshore wind leasing were so great that King Charles’s personal share increased by £45 million.

With so much money to be made, there is little wonder that some voices are calling for the process to be faster and for further discussion to be minimised. The whole thing is taking on the air of a gold rush. Vast profits are on the horizon and the big beasts of the international energy industry – many of them the coal, oil and gas giants of yesteryear – are lining up to compete for the biggest share.

The Crown Estate appears to be trying to strike a middle ground: calling for evidence to show where other sea users, including fishermen, are active, but allowing only 8 weeks for submissions to be made. The timetable they have imposed is impossible for the fishing industry to meet, given the complexity of the task of gathering data on fishing effort and location for the thousands of boats active in our waters. We are told that there will be other opportunities to input into their planning and prioritisation processes and there is no reason to doubt this. If we have learned anything from past wind farm leasing rounds, however, it is that their earliest stages are the only points where we can make any meaningful difference to what the outcome looks like. This may not be the only opportunity for fishermen to defend their grounds and their livelihoods, but it may end up being the most important.

Fishing produces affordable, low-carbon food. It makes a significant contribution to the UK’s food security and supports jobs and social cohesion in coastal communities. Money earned from fishing does not pay the shareholders of foreign-owned multinationals. It is spent in local businesses in our coastal towns and helps to keep them afloat. These considerations are often ignored by politicians and corporate decision-makers, but they are vitally important to an awful lot of ordinary people and the social fabric of our nation.

If we reduce fishing opportunities, jobs will be lost and people will suffer as a direct result. If this happens as a result of the scramble for profit; or the desire to adopt short-term solutions; or a rush to meet artificial and politically expedient targets, then we have every right to feel aggrieved. We need a genuine conversation about how best to use the national resource that is our seas in the long-term interests of the people of Britain. If that still results in decisions that will disadvantage fishermen and fishing communities, we may be disappointed, but we cannot dispute the process or the motives involved.

Our new government has an ambitious agenda for economic growth and social renewal. We should be talking to them about the fishing industry’s potential to contribute to this vision and to help spread its benefits to coastal communities. Instead we are talking to the King’s land agents, in a struggle not to lose too much more of what we already have. Again. The ever-growing squeeze on the marine space is the biggest threat to the fishing industry today. If our contribution to the nation is properly valued and our concerns are heeded, then it is still not too late to prevent a self-inflicted disaster.

Source NFFO Press Release