Planning Permission for Buckinghamshire Data Center Likely to be Quashed

The UK Government has admitted that it made a “serious logical error” when granting planning permission to a data center in Buckinghamshire, making it likely that the decision will be quashed, reports Bloomberg.

The Buckinghamshire Council had already refused this specific data center proposal twice. But the applicants – developer Greystoke Land and the UK arm of industrial services multinational Altrad – appealed the decision to the Planning Inspectorate, a governmental agency that can reassess a given proposal.

In a statement shared by Foxglove, co-executive director Rosa Curling said: "We’re encouraged that the Government now appears to recognise that blindly accepting tech companies’ magical promises about the impact of their data centers on our environment isn’t good enough. Instead, there needs to be strict legal restrictions with teeth, and a mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment for each new data center as a starting point.”