TL;DR
Asked who occupies Britain’s largest data centres and what they run there, the responsible department answered that it does “not hold the requested information”. That department has since been abolished. Meanwhile 315 sites wait in the grid connection queue and hundreds more sit in planning.
A gap at the centre of the policy
The request came from Global Action Plan, an environmental charity. Its significance is not the refusal but the admission: the state has designated these buildings critical national infrastructure, has moved to spare qualifying ones from local planning committees by routing approval through ministers instead, and cannot describe what the capacity is being used for.
Campaigners argue that combination insulates the sector from scrutiny precisely where scrutiny would bite. “The government plans to steamroller over local opposition so private companies can build these facilities — yet they can’t even explain what the benefits are and who is benefiting,” said Zack Polanski, who leads the Greens in England and Wales.
The resource arithmetic is what gives the question force. Two sites already in the pipeline would each out-emit ExxonMobil’s UK operations. Water UK cautioned in July that the country does not have the water this build-out assumes, and campaigners fear that critical-infrastructure status will put cooling ahead of households when the next drought arrives. Oliver Hayes of Global Action Plan puts the worry plainly: preferential access to constrained resources may be going to workloads nobody has justified.
The government’s answer
Ministers did not address the FOI response itself. A spokesperson defended the wider programme instead, arguing a construction pause would push investment and jobs overseas and leave Britain reliant on other countries to process sensitive health and defence data — “a disaster for jobs and national security”.
Looking forward
The pressure is converging from several directions at once. Friends of the Earth wants new sites blocked until environmental rules exist, including a requirement that projects add renewable generation rather than draw on existing supply. Holyrood is edging toward a moratorium. Westminster has already rejected a Green call to halt building, and Scottish unions have demanded a national plan rather than case-by-case approvals.
For operators, the practical risk is that transparency arrives as a condition of consent. A developer who cannot name the tenant or the workload today may find that becomes the price of a grid connection tomorrow.