Sheringham Shoal and Dudgeon Extensions Projco v Persons Unknown: offshore wind trumps fishing rights in injunction battle

A centuries-old way of life meets a government 2030 target, and the court has to decide which gives way. That, in essence, is the human story behind Sheringham Shoal and Dudgeon Extensions Projco Limited v Persons Unknown [2026] EWHC 1515 (KB), in which a High Court judge granted an injunction clearing shellfish pots and gill nets from a stretch of North Norfolk coastal waters so that a nationally significant offshore windfarm extension could complete its seabed surveys.

The case is interesting for several reasons, not least the speed at which it unfolded and the way it extends the post-Wolverhampton injunction framework into a genuine competing rights dispute between two groups, neither of whom was doing anything unlawful.

The developer, responsible for expanding the Sheringham Shoal and Dudgeon windfarms off the Norfolk coast, needed to complete preliminary seabed surveys before it could progress to geotechnical drilling and, ultimately, lay the subsea cable for its grid connection. The surveys were not intrusive; no licences were required. The problem was that over 100 "ends" of fishing gear, mostly shellfish pots connected by substantial lengths of floating rope, had accumulated in a survey area of less than five square kilometres. Survey vessels could not safely navigate the area without risking entanglement, and attempts since December 2025 to negotiate voluntary clearance with local fishing associations, including mediation in June 2026, had produced no agreement. The sticking point appeared to be the level of compensation on offer.

By the time the matter came before Deputy Judge Aidan Eardley KC, nearly half the surveys had been completed but the fishing gear was preventing the rest. Missing the 20 June start date for the remaining work risked a cascade of delays: the geotechnical surveys could not proceed until the preliminary surveys were analysed; Natural England consultations and MMO licences would take nine months; and missing the late summer 2027 window for geotechnical work would delay the entire project until spring 2028, putting the developer's contribution to the 2030 clean energy target in jeopardy.

The legal architecture the judge applied was carefully constructed. He drew on Orsted Hornsea [2021], a near-identical fact pattern in which Martin Spencer J had balanced a windfarm developer's statutory rights against fishermen's common law fishing rights and found the former prevailed, and on the Supreme Court's 2023 Wolverhampton decision, which set strict criteria for injunctions against persons unknown, including newcomers who had not yet placed gear in the area but might do so.

The fishermen were not wrong to feel the process had moved against them. One of the named defendants, James Chambers, noted pointedly that had he been contacted sooner, agreement might already have been reached. The judge acknowledged this but found that the developer's liaison officer had followed the industry's FLOWW guidance from the outset, that engagement had been extensive and that the obstacles to identifying individual fishermen were genuine: fishing licences are granted to vessels, not owners, and public records do not disclose who operates a given boat.

Two features of the order deserve attention. First, the injunction was deliberately drawn as a forward-looking prohibition on bringing new gear into the area, rather than a mandatory order requiring existing gear to be removed. This was intentional: a mandatory order would have exposed slow-moving fishermen to contempt proceedings, which the developer did not seek. The developer was instead authorised to remove existing gear itself, with clarifying language added to ensure it remained liable for any damage in doing so.

Second, the developer confirmed in open court that it would pay compensation to affected fishermen in line with the FLOWW guidelines regardless of the outcome of any challenge to the injunction at the return date. That undertaking matters. It reframes the dispute not as a developer overriding fishing rights, but as a temporary prioritisation of competing lawful uses of the same waters, with financial redress for those who bear the cost of that prioritisation.

The broader message is that where the public interest in nationally significant infrastructure is sufficiently acute and the disruption to private rights is genuinely time-limited and compensable, courts will act swiftly and the burden falls on those who cannot agree to negotiate to explain why.