UK Marine and Coastal Policy Database

Why? The UK marine and coastal policy database provides a searchable resource of government policies and inquiries relevant to the coastal zone and marine environment, including by devolved governments/administrations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A full version of the database which will be interactive will be launched towards the end of 2025. Meanwhile the tabulation below contains a sample 103 policies for one sector out of >300 gathered policies across all sectors. Users will be invited to contribute to the database and kindly acknowledge use of the resource. The intention is that this resource will support policy analysis and common understanding of the complex governance arrangements for coasts and seas by gathering an historical record of policies into one compendium.

What?

Geographical and Topical Scope: Policies which apply to sea areas within UK jurisdiction, and those which have a specific coastal focus in the coastal zone are included. The coastal relevance may be difficult to judge (for example local authority land-use plans may contain some highly relevant sections, but would also contain many pages out of scope). The decision for inclusion should therefore be evaluated on an individual basis, and a case might be made for uploading parts of documents.

Temporal Scope: Policies from the 1990s predominate in the current database, but policies over any timeperiod which stem from the governments of the United Kingdom and its constituent nations are justified.

Format Scope: Files are provided as pdf documents. The core scope of the database is government policy, although in practice what does or does not constitute policy is tricky to define. The reports of relevant parliamentary and other inquiries are included. It is not envisaged that the database will contain policies of individual private or voluntary organisations, although inclusion of policies by representative stakeholder organisations may be justified. Strategies, draft policies and reviews of policies may also be justified. Inclusion of legislation and regulations: a good record of current legislation can be found at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ which contains enacted legislation for the UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It would be better not to duplicate this, therefore the preference in this database is for original legal texts.

Key Variables:

• ID= a unique identifier appended to each record
• Author= the organisation(s) responsible for commissioning the policy, inquiry or legal text. Note that over the timeframe of the database, subtle changes to names of departments or bodies have occurred (For example, a search for policies by the national administration in Wales could be listed under the following permutations: Welsh Office, Welsh Assembly Government, Welsh Government)
• Year= year of publication
• Policy Title= the name of the policy or document as shown on the title page
• Sector= a topical classification of the policy which should be according to one of the following key terms (Cross-cutting, Fisheries and Aquaculture; Ports and Shipping; Minerals and Energy; Waste and Pollution; Recreation and Tourism; Conservation and Heritage; Coastal Flooding and Erosion; Climate; Other)
• Scope =geographical extent of coverage (UK, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Sub-national) or combinations thereof.
• Type= form of document, for example: policy, act, bill, regulation, inquiry report, white paper, guidance, policy review.
• Status = whether the policy is ‘in force’ in 2025 which should be according to one of the following keywords (Yes, Not known, Partially, Superseded, No)
• Notes= contributor led input, which allows qualifying information to be provided. For example this could be relative to one of the other fields- e.g. ‘Superseded’- noting which policy has superseded the listed policy. e.g. 2 clarification of different years of publication where a document has been re-issued or there are inconsistencies. This entry should be brief, no more than 255 characters including spaces.
• Original url= link to where document was downloaded

How to use: further guidance will be provided on data input in future versions of the database. Contributors should attend to the copyright permissions when uploading documents.