Wales to take control of Crown Estate seabed revenues from 2028 in devolution deal

Management of the Crown Estate in Wales, including the seabed around the coast and 50,000 acres of land, will transfer to the Welsh government in April 2028 under an agreement announced jointly by the two governments on Thursday, ending a decade-long campaign and matching powers Scotland has held since 2017.

The estate in Wales generated £28.7m in profit last year, almost all of it from leases for offshore wind farms and cables, and officials in Cardiff estimate that figure could reach £50m a year by the early 2030s as floating wind projects in the Celtic Sea come on stream. Under the deal, however, the Treasury will reduce the Welsh block grant by an amount equal to the estate’s average profit over the three years before transfer, meaning the immediate gain to Welsh ministers will be close to zero.

“This is about who decides, not just who gets the cheque,” the first minister said in Cardiff Bay. “From 2028 the people of Wales will decide how the seabed off our coast is used, and the growth in that income, which will be very considerable, will stay here.”

The UK government had resisted the transfer for years, arguing that the Crown Estate’s scale made it a more effective negotiator with developers. A Treasury spokesperson said on Thursday that the agreement included “safeguards to ensure that leasing in the Celtic Sea continues as a single, coordinated process” with the estate in England.

Prof Mererid Lloyd, an economist at Bangor University who gave evidence to the Senedd’s finance committee on the proposal, said the baseline deduction was “the price of being first in the queue”. “Scotland got a similar deal and has since trebled the income,” she said. “Whether Wales does depends entirely on whether the Celtic Sea projects actually get built. If they slip to 2035, this is a transfer of a liability.”

In Holyhead, Gethin Pritchard, who has fished for crab and lobster off Anglesey for 31 years, was sceptical. “It will be the same turbines, the same cables, and the same lads from Swansea deciding where I can and cannot put my pots,” he said. “The difference is I can shout at them in Welsh.”

The agreement requires primary legislation at Westminster, which is expected to be introduced in the new year. A new body, Ystad y Goron Cymru, will be established as a Welsh government company with a board appointed from Cardiff. Campaigners said they would now press for a share of the income to be ringfenced for coastal communities, as happens under a Scottish scheme that distributed £11m to local councils last year.