UK Green Party Wants to Strip Datacenters of Automatic ‘Critical Infrastructure’ Status

The Green Party of England and Wales is calling on the UK government to immediately end the blanket designation of new datacenters as “critical infrastructure,” arguing that the label lets server farms outrank ordinary households for water and electricity during shortages. Party leader Zack Polanski made the demand on August 28, alongside calls to tighten planning rules so that new facilities can only go ahead after meeting strict environmental standards and full community consultation.

What the Green Party wants changed

Under current UK rules, datacenters are automatically classed as critical national infrastructure (CNI), the same category as energy, water, and food supply. That status can prioritize them for access to utilities during shortages, which the Green Party says risks giving server farms precedence over households, public services, and food production when supplies are constrained.

In its press release, the party said it is “calling on the government to immediately end the blanket designation of new data centres as ‘critical infrastructure’ and tighten planning rules to prevent a rash of new data centres taking precedence over households for water and energy usage.” It wants planning permission granted only when a developer can show a new facility will meet the highest environmental standards and only after full community consultation.

Polanski said: “We need to slam the brakes on the rampant building of new data centres which could put our communities at risk of water shortages and drive up energy bills. And yet they are currently being waved through by our government. 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.”

He added: “Ministers are also riding roughshod over local communities, preventing local people having a say by fast-tracking planning decisions. We need clear criteria to distinguish between data centres vital to national security or public services and those that simply serve private tech companies and private profit. And crucially there must be no scenario in which a data centre receives priority in a drought over households, public services or essential food production.”

How datacenters became critical infrastructure in the first place

The UK government designated data infrastructure as CNI on September 12, 2024. Chris Bryant, then Minister of State for Data Protection and Telecoms, told Parliament at the time that the move was putting “our digital foundations in the same category as Energy and Water,” citing the sector’s importance to the economy and its exposure to cyberattacks, flooding, heatwaves, and other climate-driven disruption. The designation brought data infrastructure under the same cross-government CNI structures, led by the Cabinet Office, that already cover energy and water.

That framing is exactly what the Green Party is now pushing back on. The party argues the blanket status was designed to protect essential services, not to guarantee resource priority for facilities that primarily serve private technology companies.

The numbers behind the complaint

The Green Party’s case rests on a simple resource comparison: it says a single large-scale datacenter can use around 1.5 million liters of water a day, comparable to the daily water needs of a town of about 10,000 people. It also points to fast-growing construction activity, projecting that the value of UK datacenter projects could quadruple by 2029, with much of that growth concentrated in London and the South East, regions already classified as water-stressed.

The party’s timing is pointed. England is in the middle of a summer drought, and the Green Party’s release notes that its “slam the brakes” demand comes after water shortage fears this year; The Register separately reported that around 27 million people in England are currently under some form of drought restriction.

Beyond the immediate planning-rules fight, the Green Party’s notes lay out a broader wish list for how new datacenters should be built and run: on brownfield sites close to renewable energy hubs, powered by 100 percent renewable sources wherever possible, and required to publish audited annual figures on water and electricity consumption, with investment prioritized toward less water-intensive cooling and technology that captures waste heat for local heating networks.

The government’s response

A government spokesperson pushed back on the idea of any construction pause, telling The Register: “A pause on building new datacenters would simply send investment and good jobs abroad, while leaving Britain dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defense data. Put simply, it would be a disaster for jobs and national security.”

The spokesperson added a partial concession: “This does not mean a blank cheque for Big Tech or that every datacenter should be approved. Developers should prioritize clean power, use water responsibly, create British jobs and supply chains, and provide investment to the communities in which they are built.”

Part of a wider grid and water capacity fight

The Green Party’s complaint lands amid several other UK warnings about datacenter growth outpacing infrastructure planning. A London Assembly report published late last year flagged pressure on the capital’s power supply, with some areas of West London having to pause new housing developments over grid capacity limits. Earlier this year, MPs were warned that official forecasts of England’s future water needs had excluded datacenters altogether, raising the risk that server farms could end up competing directly with homes and businesses for supply.

The party is also pressing the government to develop a “comprehensive national strategy for AI infrastructure,” arguing that the UK’s growing reliance on foreign-owned data infrastructure, paired with the opacity of the AI systems that run on it, is becoming a strategic vulnerability as well as an environmental one. Polanski said: “Labour’s response to the environmental and social impacts of AI-driven data centres has been negligible and negligent. We need a new and comprehensive approach to AI and data centres that prioritises public control, environmental responsibility, protection of workers, joined up planning, and democratic accountability.”

Whether the government acts on any of the Green Party’s specific asks remains to be seen; for now, the blanket CNI designation that Polanski says lets planning decisions get fast-tracked past local objections remains in place.