Angela Rayner 'calls in' planning refusals for two hyperscale datacentres

Decision welcomed by new Chancellor in her first major speech in role

Two separate hyperscale datacentre projects in the Southeast of England which have recently been blocked by respective local councils have been reopened by the new Housing and Communities Secretary and Deputy PM.

Investment company Greystoke Land has previously put forward proposals to build hyperscale datacentres in Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire and Iver, Buckinghamshire. The submissions would both have involved building on green belt land and were rejected by Three Rivers District Council in Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire Council respectively,

However, Angela Rayner will ‘call in' these proposals, which effectively means that the decision will be removed from the control of the planning authority and will instead be considered by a Planning Inspector who will provide a recommendation to Rayner. The call-in power is used rarely, and is reserved for projects where local decisions may conflict with national policies or have a significant impact on economic growth outside of a single authority.

The site in Iver is particularly contentious. Whilst it is green belt land, the site itself is a former landfill site. It is a good example of what the government has identified as a ‘grey belt' site – technically within the green belt but neither green nor pleasant.

Buckinghamshire Council first refused the proposal in 2022 which, according to estimates made by the developers would have been worth £2.5bn to the UK economy and created 370 jobs.

The developers appealed and the decision was eventually recovered by the then local government minister Lee Rowley (whose boss at the time was the then Levelling-Up Housing, Communities Secretary Michael Gove.) He rejected the appeal and in a statement said that the plans would "significantly harm" the view of the Green Belt from the M25 and would lead to "unrestricted sprawl of a large built-up area."

The developed resubmitted plans for a smaller datacentre in the same site, this time a 72,000 sq m site with "landscape-led" buildings and "living green walls."

Buckinghamshire Council rejected it last month.

The proposed plan for the site in Abbots Langley has less history, and was unanimously blocked by Three Rivers Council in January. An appeal was lodged with the planning inspectorate last month and the findings due to be announced in October.

Greystoke Land who are the potential developers of both sites acknowledge that that the plan will damage the openness of the green belt land, but that given the M25 adjacent nature of the site, the economic boost outweighs the harms.

It's hard to see Rayner disagreeing with that, and Rachel Reeves made planning reform central to her first major speech in the role yesterday, name checking these two sites,

"The Deputy Prime Minister has said that when she intervenes in the economic planning system, the benefit of development will be a central consideration and that she will not hesitate to review an application where the potential gain for the regional and national economies warrant it … and I welcome her decision to recover two planning appeals already, for data centres in Buckinghamshire and in Hertfordshire."

One under discussed aspect of this discussion is power generation, and the demands on the already groaning grid – particularly in the Southeast. Giving this news a cautious welcome was John Booth, a datacentre expert from BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT:

"Allowing datacentres to be built on the green belt will not be sufficient; significant investment in the grid and distribution networks will also be required.

"Whilst placing datacentres near cities makes sense given the amount of time it takes for data to travel from one place to another, the government should also prioritise looking further afield to areas with more space, cooler temperatures, and abundant power resources," he said.