From common land to common seas: the case for creating new sea lords

This post is by Ciara Shannon of the Green Finance Community Hub.

In 2024-25, the seabed earned the Crown Estate £1.15 billion, and around £1.07 billion of that came from offshore wind leasing. Little of it reached the coastal communities living close to the turbines.

It’s the oldest question in British land history, asked again at sea. Who holds a resource none of us created, and who benefits from it? The concepts of common land, co-operatives and community energy each gave an answer for the land. Together, they point to a fairer way of managing our seas.

The common shows us a way For more than 800 years, commoners have held rights such as grazing, turbary (peat cutting) and estovers (wood gathering) over land they share but do not own outright. Enclosure removed most of those rights across England. Cumbria is where they survived best.

Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, showed that well-governed commons do not bring “ruin to all”, as Garrett Hardin argued in The tragedy of the commons (1968). They last when users set and enforce their own rules. The historian Tine De Moor found that many commons in north-west Europe lasted for centuries, as commoners kept those rules.

Long term stewardship matters Mark Carney, when governor of the Bank of England, added a second tragedy in 2015, calling climate change “the tragedy of the horizon” because its costs fall beyond the horizon of today’s decision makers.

The seabed faces both of these tragedies at once. As a shared resource, it risks being carved up by whoever pays most for it. And because offshore wind farms run for decades, the deals struck now will affect coastal economies long after today’s decision makers have gone.

Co-operatives gave the common a legal form In 1844, the Rochdale Pioneers applied the logic of the common to trade. Members owned the business together, each had one vote and surplus went back to them. Today, co-operatives write many of Elinor Ostrom’s design principles into their rules. Likewise, a co-operative turns a ‘common’ into something the law recognises, with members, a constitution and the ability to borrow, invest and sign contracts. That is what allows a community to own an energy asset, not just to campaign about one.

Community energy joins commons and co-operatives together Wind, sun and water are commons in the most literal sense: no one made them, and everyone depends on them. Community energy brings co-operative ownership to harnessing them, so the value stays local, like Cumbria’s Baywind Energy Co-operative, the UK’s first wind co-operative, in 1996.

The seabed is already enclosed The Crown Estate owns most of the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland out to 12 nautical miles, managed by an independent board under the Crown Estate Act 1961. It is run as a commercial business, paying its profits to the Treasury. Most of its £1.15 billion profit in 2024-25 came from fees, paid by developers to reserve plots.

Scotland does it differently. Since the Crown Estate was devolved in 2016, all net revenue from Scottish seabed out to 12 nautical miles has gone to coastal councils, amounting to £62.87 million by 2024-25. It is a start, but not a common. The money flows through councils rather than communities, and most offshore wind sits further out.

What a seabed common could look like Treating the seabed as a ‘common’ means giving coastal communities rights, not just grants. At the Green Finance Community Hub, through the Sea Lords of the West marine restoration and financing initiative, and our work on Project Collette, we are keen to explore four things: 1. a coastal share of seabed rent, where seabed revenue in England and Wales is passed to coastal communities, as Scotland does, and extended beyond 12 nautical miles, where the money is made; 2. community seabed leases, where plots for community-owned projects are reserved, so communities become developers; 3. a right to invest, giving local people the option to buy stakes in commercial wind farms; and 4. commoners’ governance at sea, through co-operatives or community benefit societies, so people closest to the resource set the rules.

Communities can decide how to spend the money Sea Lords of the West asks whether the principles of the common can be applied offshore. We propose a defined proportion of the seabed off the coasts of Cumbria, Lancashire and North Wales is held as a ‘common sea’, with leasing rights overseen by community bodies drawn from the coastal places that host offshore energy. Acting effectively as the ‘Sea Lords’, those bodies would lease sites to developers on behalf of The Crown Estate or take stakes in projects themselves with income reinvested locally in skills, housing, energy bills and the marine environment. The community would help to decide how the money is spent.

The idea comes from The Crown Estate itself. In 2014, it created demonstration zones for wave and tidal energy, leased to local organisations that then sub-let plots to developers. At Morlais off Anglesey, social enterprise Menter Môn holds a 45-year lease for 35 square kilometres of seabed and sub-leases to tidal developers, keeping the benefit local.

As we develop Sea Lords, we will look to the common for the principles of shared stewardship and to co-operatives for the legal and governance vehicle. Community energy, the third pillar, supplies the asset and revenue to pay for it. Together, they ensure that when communities hold the rights, they also capture the value.

The seabed is where all three meet, and where we still have the chance to build fairer ownership from the start. By giving coastal communities and local authorities the opportunity to become the Sea Lords of a proportion of their own waters, we can turn consultation into ownership and let them decide what ‘fair winds and following seas’ look like for their communities.

Let’s learn from history. Enclosure turned shared land into private holdings, justified as improvement. Today, in the same way, the seabed is being divided into plots and auctioned to the highest bidders, and the value is flowing elsewhere. Sea Lords offers a different path.