Tech and AI

Consultation documents for a 218 hectare data centre campus in outer London put its emissions at 71,751,469 tonnes over a sixty year life

By Staff Writer  |  22 August 2026

The draft order for the East Havering Datacentre Campus at North Ockendon gives a construction stage figure of 622,992 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent and a completed development figure of 71,751,469 tonnes across a sixty year design life. Up to 400,000 square metres of buildings would go on green belt land, and the electricity contract runs to 600 mega volt amperes by the end of 2033.

The site is at North Ockendon in the London Borough of Havering and covers about 218.8 hectares. The council is not handling it as an ordinary planning application. Acting as local planning authority it has consulted on a draft Local Development Order, a mechanism that grants permission for defined development up front against conditions fixed in the order itself. That consultation opened on 6 March 2026 and closed at 11.59pm on 12 April.

What the order would permit

Buildings of up to 400,000 square metres gross external area. Data centre uses take up to 340,000 square metres of that, indoor horticulture 50,000, a district heating centre up to 3,300, campus management facilities up to 2,700, and a visitor centre of no less than 300 and no more than 600.

Power is already contracted. The developer, Digital Reef, has an agreement with UK Power Networks for 600 mega volt amperes, with a minimum of 160 to be delivered from the existing Warley grid supply point substation by 31 December 2029 and the full amount available by 31 December 2033. Warley today carries a National Grid substation at 275 kilovolts and a distribution substation at 132 kilovolts, and the connection to the campus would run on four separate routes.

The carbon arithmetic

The environmental statement puts construction stage emissions at approximately 622,992 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and concludes that against borough and national carbon budgets that is adverse but below the level its method treats as material. The completed development is a different order of number. Over the sixty year design life, including end of life, the provisional estimate is 71,751,469 tonnes, which averages a little under 1.2 million tonnes a year, and the assessment grades that, before further mitigation, as adverse and above the level its method treats as material.

The mitigation is where a practitioner should look. Energy statements would be secured within the order, and the assessment applies a hierarchy of eliminating emissions, reducing them, substituting lower carbon technology and only then compensating for what is left through a contribution to the council's carbon reduction fund. The order would also require a whole life carbon assessment and a circular economy statement at detailed design, before any building starts, so the embodied carbon figure would be recalculated as the design firms up. The offset payments would be settled by legal agreement on those later numbers, not on the ones in the current documents.

It's a big threat to the ability to decarbonise in the UK. It's also going to be a big drain on important resources that are needed by homes and other businesses.

Donald Campbell, Director of Advocacy at Foxglove

The dates a contractor can work to

The indicative programme runs long. Initial site set up and highway works on Fen Lane and Ockendon Road are shown from April to July 2026, with site wide infrastructure and earthworks from July 2026 to April 2027. The first tranche of data centre floorspace, up to 100,000 square metres in one build zone, runs from September 2026 to November 2032. The second tranche, to 200,000 square metres, runs from August 2031 to October 2036, and the third, to 340,000 square metres, from July 2035 to February 2043. Highway works are to be finished before development starts on the site itself, other than a temporary construction compound, and the land stays in agricultural use until each part is needed. Core hours are 08.00 to 19.00 Monday to Friday and 08.00 to 13.00 on Saturday, with no working on Sundays or bank holidays.

The employment case is smaller than the floor area suggests. The documents give a minimum of 350 operational jobs on site, about 320 of them in the data centre use, against construction employment of 330 a year in the borough, 790 in the region and 1,340 nationwide.

The order has not been adopted and nothing here is consented. What the documents already fix is the arithmetic, and the first date in the programme has passed.