Government concedes it wrongly granted planning permission for Iver data centre
Two campaign groups are taking legal action against the government department involved, Buckinghamshire Council, and the developers over the decision to approve plans for the centre
The Government has accepted that it wrongly granted planning permission for a data centre amid a High Court battle over the decision.
Campaign groups Foxglove and Global Action Plan are taking legal action against the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government (DHCLG), Buckinghamshire Council, and developers Greystoke Land and Altrad UK over the department's decision to approve plans for the centre on the Woodlands Park landfill site in Iver.
At a hearing today, barrister David Wolfe KC, for the two campaign groups, said the Government had conceded the decision to grant planning permission should be quashed as it failed to fully consider the impact of the centre's electricity supply needs on climate change.
Mr Wolfe also argued that the remainder of Foxglove and Global Action Plan's legal challenge should still be allowed to proceed to a full hearing.
Greystoke Land is opposing the challenge, while Buckinghamshire County Council and Altrad UK were not in attendance and were not represented in court.
The DHCLG was also not in attendance and was not represented, but in a letter sent on Monday, seen by the Press Association, Carolyn Southey-Jensen, for the Treasury Solicitor, said that the department accepted "that the claim is arguable and the permission should be quashed".
Ms Southey-Jensen said that the development was granted on the basis that "mitigation measures" could be put in place, including "relating to the sourcing of low carbon energy".
She continued that while "not all of those mitigation measures... were secured" when approval was given, the Government "no longer considers these could be secured", which represented a "serious logical error".
In written submissions, Mr Wolfe said that Greystoke Land and Altrad UK asked Buckinghamshire Council for planning permission for the site in March 2024.
The council refused the bid in June that year, but the developers appealed against the decision, with the DHCLG granting permission in April last year after an inspector recommended the scheme be approved.
In a report, the inspector said that the proposal "sits at the very heart of the Government's high priority objectives for economic growth" and "involves an investment of £1 billion", which they said was "of huge importance".
They said: "The consequences of the scheme not coming forward are, on any view, extremely significant."
The inspector continued that the plans were "not inappropriate", with the Government agreeing that an environmental impact assessment (EIA) was not needed.
But Mr Wolfe said that data centres house several computers to store data, and only the electricity demands of the office buildings were considered.
He argued that an EIA should have been carried out to consider "the development's likely significant effects arising from the substantially higher energy needs required to power and cool the servers".
He said: "That generation of electricity, most particularly for the server cooling, unless achieved through renewable means, can have significant environmental impacts, including the production of greenhouse gas emissions, which impact on climate."
In court, Mr Wolfe said that the Government was "entirely correct to concede the case" in relation to the impact on climate change, and that Foxglove and Global Action Plan's other arguments were also "arguable".
Jonathan Welch, for Greystoke Land, argued that the claim had been brought on a "false premise" and should be thrown out.
At the end of the hearing, judge Sir Peter Lane gave the go-ahead for the claim to proceed, with the full legal challenge set to be heard at a later date.