abstract: We study the long-time behaviour of the stochastic Navier-Stokes equations on the torus driven by a translational invariant forcing. It is possible to exhibit a Banach space of observables such that, under very weak conditions on the forcing, the corresponding Markov semigroup possesses a spectral gap. One corollary of this result is the exponential convergence of structure functions of all orders to their asymptotic values.