Elliot Dommett MIED is a Senior Planner at Stantec and is trading independently as Dommett Co. He has authored a dissertation: The Effect of the English Planning System on the Supply of Data Centres and is involved in data centre projects nationally.
Data centres. If you’re not aware of the rapid growth in their deployment you should be, with the Stargate announcement in the US, the UK Government’s commitment to new AI Growth Zones and their recent designation as Critical National Infrastructure making national news. For the past two years, ‘Data Centre World’ occupied the largest floorspace at Tech Show London.
Central to this is the tendency for data centres to be considered as ‘employment’ uses by planners. The logic for this, despite the obvious fact that they employ people, can be attributed to a few things. Firstly, their form and massing being similar to that of a storage or distribution facility.
Secondly, the debate around what their land use class is, as per the Use Classes Order, which has positioned them either as ‘B8 Storage and Distribution’ by nature of their storage of data or ‘sui generis’, due to not otherwise being defined clearly - B8 is now the most widely accepted classification in the industry. The B8 Use Class is typically included in the ‘employment use’ or ‘economic development’ bracket terminology in town and country planning, especially in plan-making.
Lastly is that they are often built in areas with lots of employment uses, including logistics, manufacturing and offices. This is sort of cyclical – as I have pointed out above, they are often viewed within the ‘employment use’ umbrella as B8 uses, so local planning policies tend to direct them to these areas.
I think this is unhelpful, especially given their locational requirements and the drivers of their site selection, which I touch on later.
Planning for employment in local plan-making generally means creating jobs and safeguarding existing places of employment, and politicians are eager to report how local plans in their area are creating jobs when assuaging public concerns. Planning authorities then need to reconcile this with the need to limit environmental impacts, which is also a significant pressure. What then, is the incentive for planning authorities to positively plan for data centre uses if they generally have a low job density and could be seen in this context as ‘inefficient’?
First of all, data centres have specific locational requirements which can vary based on their end users and are led by decision making around other infrastructure, namely energy and fibre, with which it could be beneficial to plan for in a comprehensive fashion. The Government has clearly made this link, through the approach it is taking to spatial infrastructure planning and energy reform, although this has tended to focus on AI data centres rather than cloud service provider facilities.
Nonetheless, the Government’s approach is starting to position data centres in the sphere of national infrastructure planning. This is a positive context for effecting planning attitudes at a local level - they are digital infrastructure and, I believe, should not be seen as ‘employment uses’; in much the same way a shop or hotel employs people but is not seen as an ‘employment use’. They support mission critical data processing as a utility and it is easy to forget this amongst the current conversation (at least in the media) revolving around their use in the AI industry. Emergency services rely on them, as do international banking transactions, as does the internet - the systems you are using to read this right now, and instant messaging, I could go on. They have transcended ‘employment use’ to become essential infrastructure upon which our economy and society function. It makes sense that data would oft be referred to as the ‘fourth utility’.
The Government recognised data centres as ‘digital infrastructure’ throughout its consultation document which accompanied the draft NPPF in July last year and subsequently classified them as Critical National Infrastructure, signals I had hoped would begin to detach them from typical ‘employment’ planning. The final December NPPF however was not as clear, and until reforms are made to clearly distinguish data centres from employment uses in the Use Classes Order, I don’t think cultural change will materialise.
I personally am advocating for more change in this area and hope that this discussion has prompted thought around the topic. Whether you agree or disagree, I think that more discussion in this area is essential – data centres are not going anywhere, and we need to resolve a more positive approach to planning for them.
The view from the RTPI
In its response to the NPPF consultation last year, the RTPI pointed to the importance of data centres being planned at a larger-than-local scale, as this is the scale at which the industry and market operate. Data centres can benefit from a combined project approach, for example with energy or water infrastructure. The RTPI would welcome government guidance in this area.
