The UK government admitted to a ‘serious logical error’ in its decision to force through the construction of a major new hyperscale data centre in England. The government added that it should be ‘quashed’!
The climbdown from the government came in the form of a legal letter sent last week to the tech justice non-profit Foxglove and the environmental charity Global Action Plan. They were responsible for bringing the decision to a planning appeal at the High Court on Thursday, 22 January ‘26.
Last year, in 2025, ministers overruled Buckinghamshire Council’s decision to reject the proposed new data centre at Woodlands Park in Buckinghamshire.
Hyperscale data centres are renowned for their enormous energy consumption. Despite this, the government overruled the council’s decision with a single paragraph addressing the potential power and environmental cost of the new facility.
Responding to the government’s decision, Foxglove and the Global Action Plan launched the UK’s first legal challenge to a hyperscale data centre. This focused on the government’s failure to properly consider the energy use and environmental impact of the new data centre.
On Monday, January 19, the government wrote to Foxglove and the Global Action Plan to formally accept that its decision to grant permission for the data centre should be quashed.
Lawyers for the government admitted that they had failed to put in place measures to ensure that the developer, Graystroke, and the future operator would be held to the commitments they had made to mitigate the data centre’s climate impact.
The new hyperscale data centres planned across the UK are claimed to use vast quantities of energy. This is likely to cause a high level of carbon emissions.
In the meantime, the government has acknowledged that it made the wrong decision by permitting the data centre to move forward without binding commitments from the developer. This was about how they would reduce their environmental impact. Therefore, the Government concurred with Foxglove and the Global Action Plan to nullify the Secretary of State’s decision.
