Crown Estate Bill [Lords]

Jayne Kirkham Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her help, which I hope gives the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) some reassurance, as it sounds eminently sensible.

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

Clause 3 covers this:

“The Commissioners must keep under review the impact of their activities on the achievement of sustainable development in the United Kingdom.”

This has been written into the Bill.

[Darren Jones]

I am continually grateful for the team effort, and I am grateful to my hon. Friends for having paid such close attention to the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I represent Truro and Falmouth, which has huge potential to benefit from floating offshore wind. With Falmouth docks and our position in the Celtic sea, if the build-out of the sea is done quickly and well, our young people could benefit from good, well-paid jobs in a strong local supply chain, but intervention will be needed to get to that place. No projects in the Celtic sea have been successful in leasing rounds or contracts for difference, except for one test and demo model that is struggling to build viably due to price changes. It cannot just be left to the market to build local supply chains. That will not occur without intervention and investment in our ports, businesses and further education.

I welcome the Bill. The changes to the powers of the Crown Estate will enable it, in partnership with GB Energy, to invest in ports such as Falmouth, the mapping of the seabed to front-load the leasing rounds, research and development and local supply chains. When Falmouth marine school, in my constituency, was struggling to get funding for a level 2 course on floating offshore wind engineering for local 14 to 16-year-olds, the Crown Estate stepped in with one year’s funding to allow it to go ahead on a pilot scale. With the Bill’s changes, more such positive interventions could be made. With powers to borrow from the Treasury national loans fund and invest come greater responsibility. The framework for this borrowing is to be drawn up at a later date, but the Crown Estate is classified as a public corporation with a portfolio of nearly £16 billion, so it is important that it is held accountable and scrutinised in the normal way.

I welcome the governance changes to the number of commissioners and the fact that they will now be paid out of Crown Estate proceeds, rather than from Parliament, but the fact remains that if they are to be given more power and control and are to enter into partnership with GB Energy, their aims and objectives need to strongly align with the growth agenda, the industrial strategy and our environmental targets, and there needs to be a mechanism of accountability.

Where clause 3 compels the commissioners to

“keep under review the impact of their activities on the achievement of sustainable development in the United Kingdom”,

the words “strongly aligned with” would seem more appropriate. Most of the proceeds of the Crown Estate—it will be lucrative, now that wind energy is a priority, as the Crown Estate owns much of the seabed and there will be many more leasing rounds—go to the Treasury, but how the leasing rounds are conducted is important. If the Crown Estate’s priorities are truly to achieve sustainable development in the UK, price cannot be the sole criterion for awarding each lease. The highest bidder may not be the one who would work with the local population, consider the environmental impact, invest in further education, headquarter their development office in somewhere like Cornwall, which needs it, or grow the supply chain.

The way that leases are awarded needs to be considered in the round, and we have the power to do that. Exemptions to World Trade Organisation rules allow contracts or leases for energy security to factor in socioeconomic and environmental factors in their decision-making criteria, and we should make use of them. Currently, the Crown Estate asks for annual option fees from developers. If the aim of clause 3 is truly to be the priority, surely those option fees should be deployed into building local supply chains and mitigating those environmental and other impacts.

The partnership between the Crown Estate and GB Energy has the potential to be a huge force for good, spearheading the development of offshore renewable energy in a speedy but sustainable way and laying the groundwork for our future energy security, building local communities, infrastructure and supply chains in some of the most left-behind and deprived areas of the UK. With a unified strategy between all levels of the public sector, including this public corporation, and faithful allegiance to the aim of clause 3, the achievement of sustainable development in the UK could be the key that unlocks the future potential of the Celtic sea and hopefully kick-starts Cornwall’s clean energy revolution.