The UK arm of environmental group Greenpeace has warned the Crown Estate, King Charles’s property management company, that it would be suing it over “monopoly profiteering” at the expense of bill payers and offshore wind developers.
The Crown Estate is the legal owner of the entire UK seabed outside of Scotland, and it runs auctions to lease blocks of seabed to offshore wind developers, generating income from option fees and leasehold rents. This lawsuit warning comes ahead of one such auction.
The legal warning from Greenpeace comes after a lengthy correspondence and a face-to-face meeting with the Crown Estate management. The group is asking for an urgent review of the bidding process and for the excess profits from the last auction round to be invested in marine recovery.
Writing to the Crown Estate commissioners, Greenpeace said the estate has “a legal duty to both support the UK in meeting its climate targets and to remove the monopoly value from its seabed leasing”. But in their reply, the estate’s managers have insisted that its legal duty is to maximise profit, not help the government deliver on its climate ambition.
Greenpeace stated that the Crown Estate has charged “hefty fees for leases” of the seabed and enabled it to boost the estate’s profits. This money, the organisation claims, is then used to pay for its executives and increase the Royal Household’s official income, while driving higher costs for the wind power sector and energy bill payers.
In the first three auction rounds, the option fee paid by bidders was capped. But in the fourth round that concluded in January 2023, the estate shifted to a price-uncapped competitive auction, which bumped up fees. Greenpeace noted that the estate made over £1bn ($1.33bn) in 2024/25, with its profits skyrocketing.
The organisation also pointed out that King Charles’s official income will jump from £86.3m this year to £132.1m in 2025/6, due to profits derived from offshore wind, while the Crown Estate commissioner’s pay has risen fivefold from around £385,000 ($511,108) a year in the period 2015-2020 to a staggering £1.9m ($1.52m) in 2024/25.
“The Crown Estate should be managing the seabed in the interest of the nation and the common good, not as an asset to be milked for profit and outrageous bonuses. We should leave no stone unturned in looking for solutions to lower energy bills that are causing misery to millions of households,” said Greenpeace UK co-executive director Will McCallum.
