UK department could not say who uses its largest data centres

The UK government cannot say what its largest data centres are for. Asked under freedom of information law who uses the biggest sites and what those sites are meant to do, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology replied that it does not hold the information. The department has since been abolished. The request came from Global Action Plan, an environmental group, at a moment when hundreds of data centres are waiting on planning permission and another 315 sit in the queue for a connection to the national grid.

The answer lands in the middle of a policy push. Ministers announced earlier this year that data centres meeting set criteria can enter the nationally significant infrastructure regime, a status that routes approval through central government and around local planning committees. Campaigners say the effect is to insulate these sites from local scrutiny.

Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, said the government intends to force through private companies' projects against local opposition while being unable to explain what benefit they will deliver or who will receive it.

The resource footprint is the reason the question is being asked at all. The Guardian reported recently that emissions from two planned sites would exceed ExxonMobil's emissions in the UK, which raised the question of how such projects square with national targets for cutting emissions.

Water is the second pressure point. The government classified data centres as critical national infrastructure, and campaigners fear that in a drought, water-hungry sites could be prioritised over households. Water UK, the trade body for water companies in the UK and Northern Ireland, has warned that the country will not have enough water for an expanding data centre estate. Polanski asked what could matter more than people's access to water and a transition to a low-energy, low-pollution economy that would help restrain climate extremes.

What the sites actually run is where the disclosure gap bites hardest. There is broad acceptance that data centres deliver some necessary services. But campaigners fear that projects with heavy environmental impact and strong local opposition are being prioritised regardless of what they will be doing. Oliver Hayes of Global Action Plan, the group that filed the request, said it is likely data centres will get privileged access to resources in order to run chatbots and other harmless but wasteful and useless tasks. In more serious cases, he said, data centres may serve chatbots that let people generate intimate images of teenagers without their consent, and be used for still more dangerous purposes.

Friends of the Earth wants new sites banned until environmental guarantees exist, and clear rules published for existing and future data centres, including an obligation that every new project be matched by additional renewable generation equal to 100% of its consumption. Anisa Khan, campaigns coordinator at Global Action Plan, said that with hosepipe bans in force in parts of the country and needed housebuilding delayed by grid connections occupied by data centres, the UK does not need new chatbots at any cost. Pressure is building as the Scottish government moves closer to a moratorium of its own.

The government did not respond to a request for comment on its inability to say what the large data centres are for. A spokesperson did say that pausing new sites would only send investment and well-paid jobs abroad and leave the UK dependent on other countries to process sensitive medical and defence data, which would be a catastrophe for jobs and national security.

Those two statements sit badly together. The department's freedom of information answer says the state holds no record of who uses the biggest sites or what they are for; the spokesperson's defence rests on a specific claim about what they are for — medical and defence workloads. The strongest argument the government has for fast-tracking these projects is one its own records cannot support. That is not a case of withholding an uncomfortable answer. It is a case of never having collected it, while granting the same facilities a status that bypasses the councils that would have asked.

Notably absent from the argument on either side is a demand for the one disclosure that would settle it. Everything being fought over — power, water, grid queues, renewable matching — is an input. Nobody is proposing that operators declare tenants and workload categories as a condition of national-significance status, which is the only thing that would let anyone weigh an ExxonMobil-scale emissions footprint against whatever it is producing.

Those 315 grid connections will be allocated on the current basis, which is to say on the strength of jobs and investment figures rather than on any account of output. The UK is about to decide which of them come first, having already told a requester in writing that it does not know what they will be used for.