The row of thatched and timbered cottages on the edge of Abbots Langley once housed farm workers who supplied the nearby Ovaltine factory. Residents are fond of this physical legacy of past industries. They are much more sceptical, however, about becoming a home for the industry of the future.
Angela Rayner, UK deputy prime minister, will soon decide whether to allow a huge data centre to be built on the rolling field across from the Ovaltine cottages — putting this village at the centre of tensions around Labour’s ambition to increase construction and economic growth.
“People have chosen to live in a village and not an industrial site,” said Vicky Edwards, a local Conservative councillor.
Data centre projects such as the one in Abbots Langley are becoming a flash point as the government seeks to boost growth by breaking down the barriers to building everything from housing to new infrastructure — an agenda that will bring national economic demands into conflict with local interests.
Labour’s changes to planning policy, currently under consultation, for the first time explicitly encourage the construction of data centres. These facilities could be designated as “nationally significant infrastructure”, giving them a special planning process like large transport or energy projects.
The government has also pushed to release poor-quality greenbelt land, which it calls the “greybelt”. But what that means in practice is far from clear.
Liberal Democrat councillor Sara Bedford said the site at Abbots Langley, which borders the M25 motorway in Hertfordshire, “is not ‘greybelt’ but farmland on the edge of a residential community”.
The district council refused planning permission in January, largely on the grounds that the site lies within the greenbelt, land that is protected by the government from development. But in the first week of the new Labour government, Rayner announced she would decide the planning appeal.
The project, along with a second greenbelt data centre application in Buckinghamshire, also slated for Rayner’s decision, are seen as test cases for data centre development under the new administration — an opportunity for Labour to prove its commitment to build projects that the Conservatives might have abandoned.
“It’s hard to think of any other reason that Angela Rayner would have recovered them for her own decision if she wasn’t going to grant permission for them,” said Nick Green, a planning director at Savills.
He said the government had “made clear” that it recognised the need for the data centres and their importance to “underpinning of the UK economy as a whole”.
But large and unfamiliar data centre developments are often unpopular, given concerns about noise, pollution, power and water consumption and how much employment they provide.
Edwards said there were concerns the data centre will change the character of Abbots Langley and use a “vast amount of electricity”.
Hertfordshire has a proud history of benefiting from sectors that provided tens of thousands of jobs, including film studios and helicopter engine manufacturing. Data centres would create a fraction of those jobs, she added.
The developer in Abbots Langley is Greystoke Land, whose investors include the Berry family, once longtime owners of the Daily Telegraph.
“The UK needs multiple large data centres to support economic growth and digital leadership,” Greystoke said. “Failing to build in north-west London will mean employers and investors will look to Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and Paris instead.”
A public inquiry on the planning appeal is scheduled to begin in October, after which Rayner will make her final decision.
Demand for data centres in the London market is forecast to grow at 11 per cent a year over the next five years, according to real estate analysts at Green Street. Chancellor Rachel Reeves recently announced that Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon, had pledged to invest £8bn in the UK.
But big new projects springing up around the country risk inflaming tensions around Labour’s development agenda.
Tory MP for Beaconsfield Joy Morrissey intervened in a planning debate in parliament in July to ask if Labour ministers “really believe that there are no better sites for a data centre than directly on the only greenbelt that separates us from London?”
“Our greenbelt in south Bucks is not a political, ideological prize to be won,” she warned.
The pace of growth, powered by the rise of cloud computing and hopes for an AI boom, has strained resources in places where data centres have traditionally been built, leading to a search for new areas — in places such as Abbots Langley.
Slough, a town west of London near Heathrow airport, is one of Europe’s largest data centre hub — hosting Netflix and City of London traders — thanks to its abundant industrial land and strategic position on the fibre optic cables that run along the M4 motorway towards the Atlantic.
Construction in Slough has been hampered by electrical grid constraints, which in recent years has threatened to halt house building in the area. Some developers have been warned they could wait eight years or more before significant power hookups are available for data centres in the area.
James Craddock, UK managing director at Segro, landlord to 30 data centres in Slough, said “power is increasingly the biggest challenge for data centre developers and operators”.
Earlier this year, John Pettigrew, chief executive of the National Grid, warned that data centre power use in the UK would increase six-fold over the next decade, driven by technologies that require vast amounts of computing power, including machine learning.
Developers in Abbots Langley argue there is an “urgent need” to expand capacity within a short distance of existing centres in nearby Hemel Hempstead.
Operators looking for sites to train AI models can go further afield, because they do not need fast connections to customers, also known as low latency. Blackstone is working on a former power station site in rural Northumberland, where it hopes to ultimately invest £10bn to build one of Europe’s largest data centres.
Rival European markets are suffering similar issues. Amsterdam and Frankfurt have sharply limited new data centres, while building in Dublin is severely constrained by the power supply. The US, already the leader in data centres, could move further ahead.
“When there is too much growth too fast . . . it puts a halt on things. The resources are gobbled up and people become concerned,” said David Guarino, analyst at Green Street.
Mahdi Yahya, chief executive of Ori, a datacentre and infrastructure provider focusing on AI applications, said that “finding a piece of land that has a few megawatts available is a challenge, especially in the UK”. A megawatt of energy costs about £100,000 in the UK, compared with just £25,000 in the Nordics, he said.
Data centre developments suffer because, while they serve a general economic need, they are thought to provide less employment in the communities where they are built.
Residents fear higher-paid engineers will visit the centre from further afield, and the only local jobs will be in security, maintenance, cleaning and landscaping.
Greystoke said the development would create “hundreds of highly paid jobs”. Bedford said that “even on the developer’s best estimate” there would be “very few skilled jobs for local residents”.
Still, the need for online storage and computing capacity shows no sign of slowing down. Guarino said: “We don’t want data centres in our backyard. But we don’t want to stop consuming content. So something has to give there.”
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