UK Government Faces Legal Backlash for Approving Data Center Development on Green Belt Land

The British government is currently facing a legal challenge for approving a data center development plan. According to CNBC, environmental advocates in the UK have filed a planning statutory appeal in court in a bid to reverse approval of a hyperscale data center project on green belt land.

Green Belt Data Center Planning Fight in the UK

The legal action was triggered by the UK government’s decision to overturn a decision by the Buckinghamshire Council that disallowed development of the 90-megawatt data center in the area.

Data centers are huge facilities designed to hold numerous computing systems that companies require to deliver IT services remotely. In recent years, demand for data centers has increased as major tech companies rush to create powerful AI systems like ChatGPT.

In Britain’s town planning, green belts are open areas where building is restricted. The Buckinghamshire Council has rejected plans to set up a 90 megawatt data center at Iver’s Woodlands Park landfill site twice due to concerns that the facility would damage the environment. However, the Labour government revived the plans in a bid to revamp the U.K’s computing capacity and make the country a global AI hub.

While rejecting the data center plan in June 2024, the Buckinghamshire council said it would be inappropriate to set it up on the green belt area. But last month, the U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayber overturned this decision, granting permission to construct the facility in the area.

Rising Concerns Over Impact on Environment

As demand for data centers grows globally, environmental activists have raised concerns over the high amounts of power they need to operate continuously. Activists have particularly criticized AI systems for the massive amounts of energy they consume.

On August 21, activists from not-for-profit entities, Global Action Plan and Foxglove, said they had filed a planning statutory appeal in court under Section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act, 1990, seeking to reverse the data center approval issued by Rayner. In their review request, the activists expressed concerns over the huge volumes of water and power required to run the facility.

“Angela Rayner appears to either not know the difference between a power station that actually produces energy and a substation that just links you to the grid, or simply does not care. Either way, thanks to her decision, local people and businesses in Buckinghamshire will soon be competing with a power guzzling-behemoth to keep the lights on, which as we’ve seen in the States, means sky-high prices,” Foxglove Co-executive Director Rosa Curling said in a statement.

Need for Environmental Impact Assessment

The activists emphasized that the project should be subjected to an environmental impact assessment.

“The deputy prime minister’s lack of meaningful scrutiny of this application has serious consequences for people in Buckinghamshire and sends a worrying signal to communities across the country that more and bigger data centers are inevitable,” Head of Campaigns at Global Action Plan Oliver Hayes said.

Angela Rayner’s data center legal woes come months after the U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said there were plans to block activists from repeatedly taking legal actions against planning decisions that touch on major infrastructural projects in Wales and England. Previously, the U.K. government has emphasized the need to establish data center infrastructure in order to compete in AI development globally.

Increasingly, tech giants are seeking to leverage alternative energy sources to meet the growing power needs. In June this year, Meta expanded its partnership with Invenergy, which is America’s largest private developer and clean energy solutions company, to increase its power supply for data centers and operations.