Community Fund
Delivering £15m of funding to support long-term development of communities hosting our wind farms with decision making in the hands of local representatives who know their community best.
The Norfolk Offshore Wind Zone will bring £15m of funding for local communities, and will be in place for the 25 year life of the wind farms.
The developers of the Norfolk Offshore Wind Zone to date, Vattenfall, have completed Phase 3 of the development programme. RWE now intend to take this work forward to phase 4 which will involve recruiting an independent fund administrator through an open tender process. Details to be published shortly.
You can find reports from all previous phases in the relevant sections below.
Phase 3
During Phase 3, we met with residents in several locations along the length of the cable route for more in-depth discussions about the focus areas they had highlighted as priorities during Phase 2. The purpose of this Phase was primarily to dig into the detail of the themes that had emerged from the previous phases, and to begin developing ideas designed to support growth, resilience, and sustainability in their communities.
You can find slide packs and summary reports for those meetings below.
Workshops
Phase 2
The main purpose of the Phase 2 workshops was to share the broad parameters of the Community Benefit Fund, to begin to share any locally appropriate community initiative ideas that residents might have, and to review and build on the first phase of dialogue.
You can find reports for each of those workshops below.
Workshop Reports
Slide Packs
The slide packs presented during the workshops contain information specific to districts in which the village or town is located. Click the link for your district of interest to open a pdf version of the slide packs.
Phase 1
This report documents our learnings from the first phase of dialogue in 2021, by asking people in Norfolk how they view climate related matters, including their views on offshore wind.
The aim was to gather a broad outline of commonly held views that connect people in Norfolk – a baseline package of information that we can draw on together, and build from, to create a fund that is locally appropriate and can deliver for communities in the long term.
Next Steps
Initial region-wide survey to establish current attitudes. 1500 participants gave their views.
Local workshops to begin developing community-specific ideas were held in locations along the length of the cable route.
Thematic workshops to develop potential projects, based on local interests and needs, were held in locations along the length of the cable route.
Tender process to appoint an independent fund administrator.
Establishing the fund governance, including recruitment of local decision-making panel and criteria to ensure that the fund is responsive to local interests and needs. Community Benefit Fund opens for applications.