Summary
- The petition calls for an immediate moratorium on planning approvals for data centres and BESS outside designated AI Growth Zones.
- It also seeks local Rural Impact Assessments and investigation of project financing and economic costs and benefits.
- The proposal has no legal effect by itself, but its rapid signature growth shows planning opposition becoming more organised and politically visible.
A UK Parliamentary petition is calling for a moratorium on planning approvals for AI data centres and battery energy storage systems outside designated AI Growth Zones, adding another organised challenge to the government’s attempt to accelerate large digital-infrastructure development.
The petition, created by Devon councillor Cheryl Cottle-Hunkin and published on 17 August, also calls for mandatory local Rural Impact Assessments and greater scrutiny of project financing, costs, and benefits.
Under the Parliamentary petition system, 10,000 signatures normally trigger a government response, while petitions reaching 100,000 signatures are considered for debate in Parliament. Neither threshold automatically changes planning law.
The proposal therefore has no immediate legal effect on applications. Its importance lies in the way opposition to large digital and energy infrastructure is moving from individual local campaigns into broader attempts to change national planning policy.
The petition argues that rural communities can face impacts on farmland, landscapes, ecology, public health, and local infrastructure. It also asks for greater scrutiny of overseas finance and project-level cost-benefit claims.
Data centres and grid-scale batteries are technically very different assets, however, and grouping them under one geographic restriction would create an unusual planning framework.
AI Growth Zones were established to accelerate AI infrastructure by concentrating government support around power, planning, and large-scale compute. They were not designed as the only locations in which grid batteries should be built.
BESS projects can provide frequency response, balancing, constraint management, and other flexibility services across the electricity system. Restricting them to the same zones as large AI developments would therefore connect two infrastructure classes whose locational requirements do not necessarily align.
For data centres, the political pressure is easier to understand. Projects requiring hundreds of megawatts can compete visibly for land and electrical capacity, while backup generation, cooling systems, water use, and new transmission infrastructure can create local objections well before a campus becomes operational.
Those pressures are already changing planning oversight. DataCentral has reported that Scotland now requires councils to notify ministers about data centre applications above 50MW, while England has strengthened national planning support for digital infrastructure.
The contrast shows the policy tension facing government. Ministers want faster construction of domestic AI capacity, but the same projects are attracting scrutiny over electricity demand, water, backup generation, farmland, local economic benefits, and the credibility of investment promises.
A blanket moratorium would solve one problem by creating another. It could reduce development outside designated areas, but it would also assume that AI Growth Zones have enough land, grid capacity, network connectivity, planning resources, and market demand to absorb projects that would otherwise have been distributed more widely.
It could also disadvantage conventional colocation, edge, sovereign, and enterprise data centre projects that have little connection to the largest AI-training campuses but still fall under a broad definition of data centre development.
The current petition remains far below the threshold for automatic consideration for a parliamentary debate. Even if it reaches 10,000 signatures, the immediate consequence is a government response rather than a moratorium.
The speed at which it has accumulated support is nevertheless a useful warning for developers. Power is not the only scarce input in the current capacity cycle. Local consent is becoming an increasingly material development constraint, particularly when projects arrive with very large electricity numbers but limited public explanation of what those numbers mean in practice.
