SNP burn through almost half of ScotWind revenues in a single year

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today expressed his astonishment that the Scottish Government intends to burn through almost half of the revenues from the ten-year ScotWind leasing round in just twelve months.

In January 2022, Crown Estate Scotland announced the outcome of its application process for ScotWind Leasing, the first Scottish offshore wind leasing round in over a decade. The leasing round sold ten-year leases for 17 offshore wind projects around the Scottish coast.

This sale has attracted criticism because during the ScotWind leasing round, a £100,000 per km2 cap was placed on bids for the 7,000km of seabed. This limited the return for the Scottish Government to £700m. These one-off payments are a fraction of the average £361,138 per km2 companies had already freely offered in deposits alone in an open market auction for sites off the coast of England and Wales.

Now the forthcoming Scottish Government budget projects to spend £310m of that revenue in the financial year 2023/24.

Mr Cole-Hamilton said:

“The SNP’s choices mean that Scotland has missed a big opportunity to raise revenues that could have allowed different decisions on tax and public spending.

“The Scottish Government sold Scotland’s prized sea bed on the cheap and achieved only a fraction of the prices that are seen elsewhere in the world. It inexplicably capped the price that companies were allowed to pay for ScotWind sites, which botched the best chance for generations of bringing serious money into government coffers.

“For years nationalist politicians have sulked that we should be like Norway with their vast oil fund but the first chance they get to kickstart something similar, they burn through the money in record time.

“Almost half that money—£310 million from the 10-year licences that were sold in the auction—will be spent in the current year alone to prop up SNP-Green spending and financial mismanagement. The problem is that, once that money is gone, it is gone. Those rights are sold only once. No annual payments exist, as happens in England, and we will be waiting for five to 10 years for more money to start arriving in the form of rents on the as-yet-unbuilt wind farms.

“The Government is burning through that cash without a plan for what will happen to public services afterwards. The excuse that it is spending money on the journey to net zero does not fly when we have a budget before us that strips money out of green initiatives left, right and centre.”