Technology and AI

The critical infrastructure designation on data centres is now the thing being argued about

By Staff Writer  |  29 August 2026

The Green Party has asked the government to strip new data centres of the blanket classification that puts them alongside energy, water and food for priority access in a drought, and to tighten the planning route that goes with it.

The demand was published by the party on 28 August, after the driest July on record and a summer of drought orders. The argument is narrower than the headline suggests, and the narrow part is the part worth reading. Data centres are automatically classed as critical national infrastructure. That classification sits alongside energy, water and food, and it carries with it a priority in the allocation of water and electricity. The party wants the blanket application of it to new schemes to end, and criteria substituted.

Three asks, one of them structural

The first ask is the designation itself. The second is a planning condition: permission only where a scheme demonstrates the highest environmental standards, and only after full community consultation. The third is the one that would take work to draft, which is a test separating facilities that genuinely underpin national security or public services from those that serve a private operator's own business. At present the classification does not distinguish between them.

Data should serve people, not the other way around - but right now, because data centres are designated as critical infrastructure, people come a poor second, with data centres even being given priority for water and electricity.

Zack Polanski, Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales

The party puts the daily water use of one large facility at around 1.5m litres, which it sets against the daily needs of a town of about 10,000 people. It says the value of data centre construction is projected to quadruple by 2029, and that much of it is going into areas already classed as water stressed, naming London and the South East.

What the government has said

The government has rejected the call for a pause. Its position, given in response, is that halting new building would send investment and jobs abroad and leave the country dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defence data. No minister has been put up to defend the designation itself, which is the question the party has actually raised.

The party has also asked for a national strategy for artificial intelligence infrastructure, and the first item on its list is community led decision making on where facilities are sited. That is a planning point rather than an energy point, and it goes to the same complaint about fast tracked decisions.

Why the designation is the live question

An opposition party's demand does not change the law. The reason to note this one is that it identifies the mechanism rather than the mood. Critical national infrastructure status is not a label; it determines who gets water and power when there is not enough of both, and it shapes the consenting route a promoter can use. Any developer who has relied on that status in a programme, in a connection agreement or in a business case has relied on something that is now being contested in public by a party with parliamentary representation.

For advisers, the practical point is that the designation is worth checking rather than assuming, scheme by scheme, and that a drought summer has turned an administrative classification into a political one. Whether it survives in its blanket form is a question for the government, and it has not yet answered it.