A not so brief expla­na­tion

The Crown Estate is a col­lec­tion of marine and land assets across the UK that belong to the Crown. The Crown Estate also refers to an inde­pen­dent body which man­ages these hold­ings. It is essen­tial­ly a com­mer­cial prop­er­ty busi­ness, sit­ting between the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors. It’s task is to invest in and man­age these land and marine assets, and then pass sur­plus rev­enue back to the UK trea­sury. This is done on behalf of Welsh peo­ple, the Gov­ern­ment or the Monarch — you can decide who by con­tin­u­ing to read below.
The Crown Estate hold­ings include the Welsh seabed out to 12 nau­ti­cal miles, around 65% of the Welsh fore­shore and riverbed, and a large num­ber of mari­nas and ports. Also includ­ed are 50,000 acres of Welsh com­mon land ‚as well as var­i­ous his­toric build­ings cas­tles, farms and shop­ping cen­tres across the UK. [Click to read more about the land and build­ings the Crown Estate man­ages].

The total val­ue of the Welsh Crown Estates is more than £853 mil­lion. Its impor­tant to know though that although the land is legal­ly ‘owned’ by the rein­ing monarch, it is not their pri­vate prop­er­ty. It can­not just be sold off in exchange for this large sum. Nor is it with­in the remit of the Crown Estate body to sell it off- this state of affairs is con­fus­ing and is best explained through [his­to­ry]. A large part of what the Crown Estate busi­ness does is to rent out its land and seabed. This gen­er­ates pots of mon­ey, which is then passed to the UK trea­sury. In the year 2021 for exam­ple, £313m of rev­enue prof­it was trans­ferred. A por­tion of this will be bypassed to the Monar­chy itself. This por­tion is quite arbi­trary and varies year on year, rang­ing from 12% in 2023/24 (£86m UK wide) to 25% in 2022.

The Crown Estate’s (CE) oper­a­tions are first and fore­most finan­cial man­age­ment. It is gov­erned by a board of direc­tors (called com­mis­sion­ers) with a CEO. Sec­ond­ly, the CE’s phys­i­cal oper­a­tions large­ly involve envi­ron­men­tal projects. The CE will employ peo­ple rang­ing from finan­cial port­fo­lio man­agers and mar­ket ana­lysts to hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ist and riv­er ecol­o­gists. The CE is also the body which licens­es any indi­vid­u­al’s or organ­i­sa­tion’s activ­i­ty on the seabed. This includes autho­ris­ing fish farm­ing, marine aggre­gate extrac­tion and lay­ing telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and pow­er cables. Fos­sil fuel extrac­tion is exclud­ed, which is the ter­ri­to­ry of the UK gov­ern­ment.

Over the last decade, most of what the CE has come to do is license the devel­op­ment of off­shore wind farms. Even though the CE only man­ages the first 12 nau­ti­cal miles of the seabed ‘in right of the Crown’, it has been giv­en respon­si­bil­i­ty for all marine ener­gy assets in UK waters (except those of Scot­land). After autho­ris­ing their devel­op­ment, the CE then extracts an agreed rent from the devel­op­er over the course of the asset’s life­time. You can read more about how this is done [here].


It is to some unsur­pris­ing that most of the CE’s resources are chan­nelled into this area. Off­shore wind tur­bine tech­nolo­gies devel­oped rapid­ly in the 2010’s. Tur­bines became much more effi­cient as a result of the greater tur­bine heights, larg­er blade diam­e­ters and the use of direct-dri­ve gen­er­a­tors. In response to this, gov­ern­ments and large cor­po­ra­tions could bare­ly catch their breath in mak­ing pledges to build wind farms. Any of these devel­op­ments have to go through the CE first. The val­u­a­tion of the CE’s marine port­fo­lio in Wales shot from £49.2 mil­lion in 2020 to £549.1 mil­lion in 2021. In 2022 it was £603 mil­lion, before reach­ing the £853 fig­ure in 2023. Com­men­su­rate­ly, the CE began to redi­rect its resources to accel­er­ate the con­struc­tion process of wind farms.
Before the val­ue of the seabed rock­et­ed dur­ing the late 2010s, the [Scots man­aged to get their Crown Estates devolved], so they could man­age their devel­op­ment them­selves. This is some­thing we want for our­selves, but we realise the UK gov­ern­ment will want to hold onto the seabed tight­ly, so that they can stay in con­trol of both its man­age­ment but above all the col­los­al rents that will be extract­ed in the decades to come. So why exact­ly do we think we should bring the Crown Estates under Welsh man­age­ment?