The House Opinion Article | We must take back control of our data centres

(Dmitriy Shironosov/Alamy)

7 min read25 min

My interest in data centres did not begin with national security. It began with water.

In October 2024, ministers announced a vast Blackstone-backed campus near Blyth – one of the largest private investments of the parliament, presented as a vote of confidence in Britain.

I asked a series of Written Parliamentary Questions: had the environmental impact and pressure on local water supplies been assessed before the announcement, and had any tax incentives been offered?

The replies were brief but revealing. Environmental assessments are for developers to commission, and whether one is required is for the local planning authority. Water is also a matter for the local planning authority. On the central questions – what the project would demand from the place around it, and whether ministers knew before they celebrated it – the answer was essentially: not us.

That might be defensible if this were a single planning application. It is not. Data centres are the physical foundations of the AI economy, government services, financial markets, healthcare records, and increasingly the systems through which democratic life itself is mediated. In September 2024, they were designated critical national infrastructure, yet the machinery of government still treats them as if they were ordinary sheds on an industrial estate.

Over the following year, I kept asking questions. I found that emissions from data centres are counted nationally but not attributed to specific sites, while water sits elsewhere. The government does not routinely track individual plans for data centre developments. Even after the Tech Prosperity Deal with the US brought further investment, the answer was the same: environmental assessments are for developers.

I say this in sorrow rather than anger, because this is a Labour government and I want it to succeed. But the pattern is hard to ignore. Ministers announce. Departments refer. Developers assess. Local authorities are left to decide what all that means in practice. Along the way, the national interest is assumed rather than examined.

This is a governing choice, not a small administrative gap. The problem is not that nobody is in charge, but that those in charge are not accountable to British voters. The framework that ultimately governs how this infrastructure operates – who can compel disclosure of the data on it, and on what terms it can be cut off – is set in Washington, not Westminster.

The water question alone should give us pause. Data centres can require large and reliable supplies, both for power generation and cooling. Many are planned in parts of England already classed as seriously water-stressed. The Environment Agency’s own modelling projects a public water supply shortfall of around five billion litres a day by 2055, with further pressure from sectors including data centres adding more than a billion on top. Yet there is still no statutory requirement for operators to report their water use.

Energy is the same story. The National Energy System Operator expects demand from data centres to rise sharply by the end of the decade. Electricity in Britain currently costs around four times what it does in the US, partly because our wholesale electricity price is set by imported gas almost all the time.

None of this means we should say no to data centres – but it does mean we should stop pretending their location is a purely local matter. A facility that draws heavily on the grid, competes for scarce water and underpins national digital services is not just another commercial building.

Nor is this just about pipes and pylons. It is about power in the political sense too. We are encouraged to think of data centres as investment, and only investment. But what kind of dependency is being built, who controls the underlying systems, and whose law ultimately governs them?

Recent events should have ended any complacency. When the Donald Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC) in February 2025, the chief prosecutor lost access to his Microsoft email account. Microsoft said the ICC made the formal decision; the ICC said Microsoft made it impossible to do anything else. Either way, a sanctioned individual was cut off from the digital tools of his job because of a US executive order. 

Separately, Police Scotland found that data was being routed through Microsoft servers across many countries through “follow the sun” support arrangements, potentially placing access to it within foreign legal reach. Asked why sovereignty had not been guaranteed, Microsoft’s reply was simple: no one had asked. That sentence should chill ministers.

The problem is not that nobody is in charge, but that those in charge are not accountable to British voters

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The hyperscalers building this infrastructure on British soil – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta – are extraordinary. They’re also highly extractive, and operate under legal frameworks that are not designed around British democratic sovereignty. Their platforms shape what citizens see. Their AI models are trained on data they control and deployed on terms they set.

This is exactly why democratic governments must not drift into dependence by accident.

Even this understates the problem. A data centre in Britain running American software and American AI models, governed in the last instance by American law, is sovereign only in the most superficial sense.

Other countries are starting to respond. France is investing in Mistral. Germany has set up a Centre for Digital Sovereignty to push public services towards open-source software they can audit and control. The International Criminal Court has now begun migrating off Microsoft entirely, choosing Germany’s openDesk project as the alternative. Meanwhile, Britain has investment summit press releases.

There is a real tension here. Expanding domestic data centre capacity in the name of resilience means increased demands on UK land, energy and water. The modern economy cannot function without this infrastructure, so the question is not whether it should exist but on whose terms it is built and what Britain receives in return. 

At present, we risk getting the worst of all worlds: local environmental pressure, relatively modest permanent employment, and too little sovereignty because core services are governed from elsewhere. Communities carry the footprint. Ministers claim the investment. The strategic dividend is owned by a handful of US corporations and tech-billionaires.

So, what should change? First, significant data centres should be required to report water and energy use in a consistent, audited and public form. If the infrastructure is critical, the evidence base must be too. Regulators, water companies, grid planners and local communities cannot plan around what they are not allowed to see.

Second, the promised National Policy Statement must do more than smooth the path for development. It needs to set out where data centres make sense, where water stress makes them harder to justify, where grid capacity exists, and where ecological and community concerns create legitimate grounds for refusal, not just delay. Overriding local planning decisions by ministerial call-in or fast-track designation may sometimes be necessary but should never be the default.

Third, public procurement needs a sovereignty test. Where public money or public data is involved, the presumption should be that UK law genuinely governs, audit rights are real and exit costs do not trap the public sector inside one vendor’s ecosystem. “Cloud first” cannot mean “sovereignty later”.

Finally, Britain should take seriously the case for a public-interest stake in the compute layer. That could mean a public cloud company, public options for sensitive services, or stronger public ownership of core AI capacity. The exact model is open for debate; the principle should not be.

None of this is anti-investment. Properly handled, it is what makes investment durable.

The questions I began asking about water turned out to be the right questions – they just had a longer tail than I first realised. Follow the water and you reach the grid. Follow the grid and you reach the cloud. Follow the cloud and you reach the question that should sit at the centre of any serious industrial strategy: who is really in charge?

The honest answer is: not us. Not yet. And not unless we choose to be. 

Clive Lewis is Labour MP for Norwich South