Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what support his Department is providing to UK ports to deploy the green infrastructure necessary for increasing the UK's offshore wind capacity.

The expected rapid deployment of offshore wind across the UK, Europe and globally over the next decade, together with the increasing size of turbines, means that there is a need for a major expansion in manufacturing capacity in the coming years.

My rt hon Friend the Prime Minister recently announced £160 million of new funding for coastal manufacturing infrastructure. The ‘Offshore wind manufacturing investment support scheme’ aims to accelerate the development of large-scale manufacturing portside hubs, which could strengthen the UK’s offshore wind manufacturing capability, creating employment and investment in both coastal communities and the wider supply chain.

Following a Request for Information in October, earlier this month my Department launched a competitive process to support a large coastal manufacturing site for the offshore wind industry. This would create manufacturing clusters where several large-scale producers can co-locate.