Summary
- Andy Burnham rejected a national moratorium after concerns were raised in Parliament about large data centres, land use, and local disruption.
- He reiterated support for AI Growth Zones and the policy allowing local authorities to retain growth in business rates.
- The intervention leaves the government backing expansion while political scrutiny grows around power, land, jobs, and community benefit.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has rejected a national moratorium on future UK data centres, arguing that the infrastructure can attract wider investment while acknowledging concerns over the effect of large developments on host communities.
Burnham set out the position during Prime Minister’s Questions after Labour MP Ian Lavery raised proposed developments in his Blyth and Ashington constituency.
Lavery argued that communities were being asked to give up land and absorb disruption from large facilities, and asked whether approvals should be paused until regulation catches up.
Burnham said he would not go as far as a moratorium.
He instead argued that data centres can become a magnet for other investment and pointed to the government’s AI Growth Zone policy, under which local authorities can retain 100% of growth in business rates associated with designated zones.
The exchange puts the government on the side of continued data centre development while showing how rapidly the political argument around large facilities has moved beyond conventional planning issues.
The UK government created the AI Growth Zone programme to improve access to electricity and planning support for large AI-enabled data centre developments.
The existing programme requires prospective zones to demonstrate a route towards very large electricity demand. Government policy published before Burnham became Prime Minister set an ambition for nationally significant sites capable of serving at least 500MW by 2030.
Expansion faces a tougher local argument
Burnham’s comments do not remove the opposition to large developments.
The issue has become increasingly visible in England and Scotland as proposed campuses move into hundreds of megawatts and communities examine their effects on electricity infrastructure, land, water, backup generation, construction, and employment.
The Scottish Parliament has recently debated calls for a pause on hyperscale AI data centre applications, while a UK Parliament petition is seeking a moratorium on data centres and battery projects outside AI Growth Zones.
Burnham’s answer suggests his government prefers to address local resistance through a stronger economic return rather than halting development nationally.
The business-rates mechanism is central to that approach because it gives local authorities a direct fiscal interest in infrastructure that otherwise supports customers and digital activity far beyond the area hosting the buildings.
That does not resolve the infrastructure trade-offs.
The UK Compute Roadmap, last updated in April, forecast that the country would need at least 6GW of AI-capable data centre capacity by 2030. It described that as around three times the available capacity used in the government’s baseline.
The roadmap also envisaged nationally significant AI Growth Zone sites capable of serving at least 500MW, with at least one zone potentially exceeding 1GW by 2030.
Those figures predate the change of Prime Minister and should be treated as the existing policy baseline rather than a newly announced Burnham government target. His defence of the Growth Zone model in Parliament nevertheless indicates that the programme remains part of the government’s approach.
Infrastructure at 500MW or 1GW scale cannot be assessed solely as commercial property. It requires major electrical connections and substations, cooling and heat-rejection systems, network capacity, construction supply chains, and extensive resilience infrastructure.
Those requirements create competition for resources that have other industrial and residential uses, particularly grid capacity and development land.
Employment is also becoming a more contested part of the planning argument. Data centre construction can employ large numbers of specialist contractors, but permanent operational workforces are considerably smaller than those of many industrial facilities occupying comparable land or consuming comparable amounts of electricity.
That is one reason Lavery’s challenge is likely to recur even without a national moratorium. Local representatives increasingly want to know what remains in the host area once construction has finished.
Burnham has now given one answer: retain the business-rate growth and use the data centre as an anchor for additional investment.
The effectiveness of that approach will depend on whether the wider cluster materialises and whether communities judge the fiscal return sufficient against land, infrastructure, and environmental effects.
The government is not closing the data centre pipeline. The harder task will be demonstrating which developments justify hundreds of megawatts of capacity, which locations can accommodate them, and how the benefits are distributed once the buildings are operating.
