Summary
- The UK government has issued a Section 35 direction for QuestPit Limited’s proposed data centre campus at Ampthill Road, Bedford.
- The direction brings the project into the Development Consent Order route under the Planning Act 2008.
- The decision provides a live example of large data centres being handled through nationally significant infrastructure style consenting.
The UK government has issued a Section 35 direction for QuestPit Limited’s proposed data centre campus at Ampthill Road, Bedford, bringing the scheme into the Development Consent Order route under the Planning Act 2008.
The decision page published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government identifies the project as a business or commercial development consisting of a data centre campus in Central Bedfordshire.
The direction follows a request that the development be treated as requiring consent through the Planning Act regime. That process is normally associated with nationally significant infrastructure and is now being used for some large data centre campus proposals.
Large campuses get a different consent route
Section 35 allows the Secretary of State to direct certain business or commercial projects into the Planning Act 2008 regime when they are judged to have national significance. For data centres, that can move decision making away from a conventional local planning application and into a centralised examination process.
The Bedford direction gives a specific project example to a policy change that has been gathering pace. The UK government has already confirmed that data centres can be directed into the nationally significant infrastructure project framework, and Ampthill Road now shows how that position can be applied to a live proposal.
The route does not grant consent. A Development Consent Order still requires detailed examination of environmental effects, land, transport, construction, utilities, community impact, mitigation, and project need.
Developers may see the DCO path as a clearer process for projects whose scale, power demand, and economic role exceed the usual assumptions behind local commercial planning. Local authorities and communities may have concerns about local influence, infrastructure burden, and the balance between national digital capacity and place based planning control.
Power and construction remain the hard parts
The planning route does not remove the physical delivery test. A campus scale data centre still needs power connections, substations, backup systems, cooling plant, fibre diversity, water and drainage arrangements, secure access, construction logistics, and long term operations planning.
The UK’s data centre debate has become more pressing as AI demand increases the size of proposed facilities. Ministers want more domestic compute capacity, but the same projects must compete with housing, renewables, industry, and electrification for grid capacity and land.
Bedford also sits within a wider search for sites beyond the established West London and Slough cluster. Developers are assessing locations across Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Essex, the Midlands, and other areas where land, fibre, and power prospects may support larger campus formats.
The DCO process will require the project to provide detailed evidence on energy strategy, cooling approach, carbon assessment, construction management, biodiversity, traffic, security, and local mitigation. Those areas will determine whether the project can justify its place in a national consenting process.
Large UK data centres are increasingly being treated as infrastructure because their power demand, construction impact, and economic role go well beyond ordinary commercial property. The Bedford direction may provide a clearer route for the project, but it also brings a more formal standard of scrutiny.
