Summary
- The Green Party is calling for tighter planning, water, energy, and heat-reuse requirements for new UK data centres.
- It also wants the government to narrow or reverse the critical-infrastructure treatment applied to UK data infrastructure.
- Government documents describe CNI status as strengthening resilience support; they do not state that it automatically guarantees priority access to water or electricity.
The Green Party has called for tighter environmental and planning controls on new UK data centres, adding political pressure around water and electricity consumption as development accelerates.
The party wants the government to end what it calls the blanket designation of new data centres as critical infrastructure and says planning permission should be conditional on stronger environmental performance and community consultation.
Its proposed measures include audited annual reporting of electricity and water consumption, greater use of low-water cooling systems, heat reuse where practical, and renewable-energy sourcing. The party has framed the intervention against drought and water-supply concerns during the summer.
One part of its argument requires qualification. The Green Party says Critical National Infrastructure status means data centres are prioritised for water and energy, including during drought. The government’s published explanation of the designation does not state that CNI status automatically confers priority utility access.
When data infrastructure was designated a CNI subsector in September 2024, the government said the move would put the sector on an equal footing with other critical systems for resilience purposes and allow closer support in anticipating and recovering from major incidents such as cyber attacks, outages, and extreme weather.
The designation therefore reflects the consequences of disruption to data infrastructure. It is not, on the public documentation reviewed for this article, a blanket statutory guarantee that every new data centre development moves ahead of households or other users in water and electricity allocation.
Environmental scrutiny is moving closer to planning
The Green intervention nevertheless reflects a genuine policy pressure. Large data centre campuses can create substantial electricity demand, and some cooling designs can use significant quantities of water. The effect varies widely between facilities depending on climate, cooling architecture, water source, operating temperatures, server density, and how water use is measured.
That makes disclosure increasingly important. A project using closed-loop dry or hybrid cooling can have a very different operational water profile from one relying heavily on evaporative cooling, while the same facility may still have considerable indirect water impact through electricity generation.
Heat reuse presents a similar case. Large data centres reject significant quantities of low-grade heat, but turning that output into a useful district-heating resource requires nearby demand, pipework, compatible temperatures, and often heat pumps. Planning requirements can encourage developers to make provision for heat recovery without guaranteeing that a viable customer exists.
The UK is simultaneously trying to accelerate data centre investment. Government AI Growth Zones are intended to improve planning support and access to power, while data infrastructure has been brought further into national resilience policy because of the economy’s dependence on cloud and digital services.
That creates an increasingly visible tension between rapid capacity growth and local infrastructure constraints. Data centre developers need electricity at industrial scale, land suitable for secure facilities, network connectivity, and cooling, while planning authorities have to consider cumulative pressure on utilities, communities, transport, and the environment.
The government is also moving towards stronger cyber and operational-resilience oversight. Current proposals would bring qualifying data centres into the Network and Information Systems regulatory framework under Ofcom, addressing what government has described as the absence of minimum sector-wide cyber-security and operational-resilience requirements.
The Green Party’s proposals go further into environmental planning rather than operational security. Whether they gain policy traction will depend on how the government balances its AI infrastructure objectives with increasing concern over power, water, and local consent.
The debate is therefore moving beyond whether the UK needs more data centre capacity. The more difficult questions concern where it can be built, which resources it can access, what performance data operators must disclose, and what obligations should follow when a digital-infrastructure project competes with other large users of the same physical systems.
