NEW CASE LAUNCH: Foxglove launches UK’s first legal challenge against the construction of a hyperscale data centre and to defend our power, water and environment
Foxglove has launched the first legal challenge to a hyperscale data centre in the UK being forced through planning by government, despite the danger of blowing up already sky-high electricity prices for local households and small business, as well as serious concerns about the environmental impact.
We are delighted to be bringing this case alongside our partners, the environmental charity Global Action Plan. In legal terms, this is a Planning Appeal under Section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. It was issued to court this week and filed on the Secretary of State and all interested parties.
The target is a new 90 megawatt data centre at Woodlands Park, in Buckinghamshire, proposed by developer Greystoke. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner approved its construction smack bang in a part of the country where many other data centres are clustered, just down the road from London, and overruled the decision of the local council to reject it.
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It’s no secret that data centres consume huge amounts of water and power and blast dirty clouds of pollution into our air. Foxglove has worked with the Times newspaper to expose the amount of water being used already by data centres in the UK, let alone if the government keeps rubberstamping new hyperscalers.
We’ve worked with the Guardian and Telegraph to expose the scale of new polluting emissions from hyperscale data centres.
But in her letter forcing through construction of the Woodlands data centre, Rayner included just one paragraph addressing the potential power and environmental cost of the new data centre. Bafflingly, they didn’t even bother to do an Environmental Impact Assessment – a baseline for any construction project that could have any significant effect on the surrounding area, let alone one likely to make as big of an impact as a new hyperscale data centre.
In the single paragraph where the Deputy Prime Minister did bother to address the power and environmental consequences of the new data centre at all, she denied the need for an Environmental Impact Assessment because the site has a connection to the local power grid. That is nothing like sufficient reason to refuse an EIA for a project that can reasonably be expected to consume significant amounts of power and generate large amounts of new polluting carbon emissions.
The Secretary of State also appears to have accepted Greystoke’s assertion that the “large amount of power” required will be “provided directly from Iver Power Station located to the north of the site.”
However, Iver Power Station is not a power station that itself generates electricity. Instead, it is a substation that just provides a connection to the local power grid. In other words, there appears to be no dedicated separate power supply for the data centre. And when data centres compete with households and businesses for power from the grid in a local area it tends to result in rocketing energy prices.
Neither did the Deputy Prime Minister’s letter say anything at all on the potential water cost of the new data centre, despite the UK currently seeing four parts of the country in drought and experiencing yet another heatwave.
The biggest water company in the UK says hyperscale data centres use between 4-19m litres of water per day on average. Greystoke say they aren’t going to use any water for cooling, but the local water provider, Affinity, made two responses to the planning consultation and neither was ever published.
So, if the new data centre won’t use any water, why can’t we see the formal response from the water supplier saying that’s the case and they have no objection? It’s especially strange, given there is a binding legal obligation to be as transparent as possible in explaining how planning decisions have been made.
Finally, there is the question of the mystery operator who will take over the data centre once it is built. We don’t know, though the government and developers do, and bill them as a ‘global Data Centre provider’.
And that’s the final key point: Greystoke has made a series of promises about how the data centre will run in future, but given they won’t be the ones in charge of it – and refuse to reveal who will be – it’s impossible to say to what extent, if at all, whoever ends up running the site will be held to the promises Greystoke makes now.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. Rayner’s action at Woodlands is the third time she has overruled a council to force through construction of a huge new data centre, following previous decisions at Court Lane, also in Buckinghamshire, in December 2024 and Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire in May 2025.
The pattern appears to be set: put in a planning application for any size of new data centre, anywhere in the country, and no matter its particular merits you appear to have a good shot at getting Rayner’s rubberstamp.
It looks a lot like we are seeing the beginning of a data centre speculation bubble – and that’s before you even try and actually switch these monsters all on in the first place, and then keep them running.
That’s why Foxglove has decided now is the time to launch this legal action and to make sure any new data centres built in Britain are actually good for Britain – not dodgy tech billionaires in the US looking to harvest our power and water, and derail our route to a secure, renewable energy future.
If you would like to join us in helping to fund this case, you can chip in using the button below. We’ll have more news soon.