Cato in Fife
Why here?
We believe in the “plan-led” approach to Planning in Scotland, and our earliest site searches included redundant, brownfield, and underused land. No suitable or available alternative site was identified elsewhere in Fife. Cato is located on land identified as “employment land” in the current Fife Local Development Plan. This is a designation that includes industrial uses. Cato’s location benefits from its proximity to both distribution and transmission substations, while also meeting the project’s other complex technical and operational requirements.
While the site is currently in agricultural use, it is not Green Belt land. Indeed, this agricultural use means that the site is not especially rich in biodiversity, and multiple other uses would be compatible with its designation as “employment land”.
Fife has a long industrial and energy heritage, and today it is one of the strongest parts of Scotland’s renewable energy sector, with around 1.2GW of installed capacity, double that of Cato. It also has a deep pool of skilled engineers and technicians and a growing base of tech talent. The region has the skills and the heritage to support cutting-edge infrastructure of this kind.
A region in transition
Fife is going through real economic change. The closure of ExxonMobil’s ethylene plant at Mossmorran in early 2026 brought decades of industrial activity at the site to a close, and released a pool of highly skilled, experienced workers into the local labour market: engineers, operators, technicians, project managers. People with the kind of training and discipline that complex industrial sites depend on.
That pool of skills is one of the reasons Cato is ideally located. We do not need to bring those skills in from elsewhere, and it may mean that skilled workers in Fife don’t need to go elsewhere to find work. If you are interested in the possible employment opportunities, please contact our team.
What happens next
An application has been submitted to Fife Council seeking Planning Permission in Principle, an initial approval that establishes whether a development of this type is acceptable in principle on this site. The application is supported by detailed environmental studies of noise, air quality, water, landscape, and ecology, all of which are publicly available on the Fife Council planning portal. If approved, a second, more detailed application follows, at which point the specifics of the final design will be fully consulted upon.
