The Government has been forced to admit that its own planning approval for a major AI datacentre should be scrapped after failing to fully consider climate impacts, in what campaigners have described as a “shameful fall”.
Former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has overruled a local council’s opposition to allowing a hyperscale datacentre on greenbelt land by the M25 in Buckinghamshire in line with Labour’s pledge to enable rapid private investment in AI. But his successor, Steve Reid, has admitted that the reasons for not requiring an environmental impact assessment were “inadequate” and “the permission should be cancelled”.
The government admitted it had made a “serious logical error” during a legal challenge to the approval this week.
The scheme, also known as West London Technology Park, has been praised by promoters as having the potential to attract £1 billion foreign direct investment. The U-turn comes as environmental campaigners concerned about the carbon emissions and water use of energy-hungry datacentres claimed the approval was unlawful.
He accused the government of being too accepting of developer assurances about environmental impact and failing to properly consider energy use.
The case is a blow to the government’s strategy to accelerate datacenter construction to attract investment from technology companies. In September 2024 it designated datacentres – which train and operate AI systems – as critical national infrastructure, indicating their importance to the British economy. Peter Kyle, the former technology secretary, called them “the engines of modern life”, powering the digital economy and keeping our most private information secure.
The 72,000-square-metre (18-acre) datacenter on a former landfill site in Iver is being developed by Greystoke, which declined to comment.
“We wouldn’t need to drag the government to court to get them to admit that their decision to support Big Tech’s polluting datacenters was fundamentally wrong,” said Rosa Curling, co-executive director of tech equity organization Foxglove.
“For too long, ministers have been putting the profits of Trump-supporting tech billionaires ahead of the interests of the British public. Nowhere is this more evident than in their willingness to force through massive datacentres against the wishes of local communities, without any consideration of the devastating damage they will do to our environment.”
Sonja Graham, chief executive of the Global Action Plan, an environmental charity that was part of the legal challenge, said: “This shameful collapse could have been avoided if the government had done its job and scrutinized big tech’s weak carbon commitments in the first place.”
He said: “People across the UK are worried about the proliferation of datacentres and what that means for access to water and electricity. The government sleeping rough in a way that won’t help reassure them.”
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Said government had confirmed in court on Monday that the Secretary of State wanted to accept the challenge and accepted that the permission should be cancelled.
The UK will have approximately 1.6 gigawatts of datacenter capacity in 2024, which is projected to grow fourfold by 2030. However, this may still not be enough to meet the demand, Government analysis found.
last year kyle attacked “Outdated planning processes” are holding back the creation of technology infrastructure and it said: “The datacentres we need to power our digital economy are blocked because they ruin the view from the M25.”
