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Friday, 31 January 2025

New MPAs Will Compensate for Damage from Offshore Wind – and Fishing is in the Firing Line Again.


A Ministerial Statement by Emma Hardy MP, Minister for Water and Flooding, has set out the Government’s plans to expand the UK’s MPA network, to make up for environmental damage caused by offshore wind farms.

Today’s Ministerial Statement from Defra certainly demonstrates the Labour government’s green credentials: they are enthusiastically recycling a policy snatched from the wreckage of their Conservative predecessors.

For years, we have been told that offshore wind farms are a clean energy panacea, generating electricity with none of the negative environmental effects of fossil fuels. While their benefits as a low carbon power source cannot be denied, the halo that so many have been so keen to place above them is becoming seriously tarnished. People have become increasingly aware of their short lifespan, disruptive construction processes and vulnerability to attack. Now it seems there is acknowledgement that they are damaging the environment too.

Time and again, the authorities have granted permission for offshore wind farms to be built on the basis of environmental impact assessment reports invariably stating that each proposed development will cause no significant harm. Now those same developments are apparently so damaging that a slew of new marine protected areas is necessary to make up for it. Knowing this, will we now pause in our headlong rush to industrialise Britain’s seas, until we understand how successive governments got it all so wrong?

Of course not. Nothing, it seems will reduce the government’s enthusiasm for allowing foreign energy giants to build power stations in our waters. Instead, we will allow them to carry on as before, damaging the marine environment in one location, while pretending that this can somehow all be made better by ‘protecting’ the sea somewhere else.

Clearly, this announcement is just the start of a process and a lot is left unsaid. We do not know how large these MPAs will be; where they will be located; or exactly how they will be managed. The fact that fishermen are mentioned so explicitly in the Ministerial Statement is a worrying sign of how obviously our industry is in the firing line, but also a positive indicator of the government’s willingness to engage with us. Indeed, it is quite refreshing to hear politicians acknowledging that the decisions they are taking will impact the fishing industry. There has been far too much empty rhetoric about ‘coexistence’ and ‘colocation’ in the past. Now it is admitted that these proposals have the potential to damage fishing businesses, perhaps we can start to have the honest conversations and do the difficult work necessary to minimise and mitigate the harm that most of us in the fishing industry have seen coming for years.

The Fisheries Act and the Joint Fisheries Statement are very clear in their commitment to treating environmental, social, economic and food supply concerns equally. We assume that the government will abide by the law and carefully balance these concerns in any decision that it makes about this new system of MPAs. We assume also that the commitment to base marine management measures on the best available science will also be upheld and these new MPAs will not be more examples of lines drawn on charts to satisfy the desire to control the sea and ban things, with no coherent conservation purpose served.

Fishermen depend on healthy seas. If compensating for the damage done by the power industry requires fisherman to be displaced, then it is only just for them to be compensated for this damage to their livelihoods. If not, then the old ‘polluter pays’ principle of environmental management will be turned on its head: the energy companies will continue to pollute, while fishermen pay for it.

There is a solution to this problem, of course. If fishermen are going to be pushed aside for yet more MPAs, it is possible to make room for them. The Johnson government’s disastrous Brexit deal gave away access to the UK’s territorial waters between 6 and 12 miles to the EU. Many of its fishing boats continue to work there, further constraining British fishermen. When the Trade and Cooperation Agreement that governs our relationship with Europe is revisited in 2026, our new government has the opportunity to finally do something different to its predecessor. It can stand up to the EU’s demands to continue the current unsustainable access arrangements; assert the UK’s autonomy as an independent coastal state, and retake all of our territorial waters for UK fishermen. They will be far better able to withstand this latest increase in spatial squeeze as a result.

Warm words about the importance of fishing and about food security are always welcome, but it is time that they were followed by action. This is the perfect opportunity for Labour to show that they are made of sterner stuff than their predecessors and, at least in this regard, to start managing the UK’s seas for the benefit of its own people.

Full story courtesy of the NffO website.