Question to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of requiring datacentre operators to report on the purpose and end use of their computing capacity as a condition of planning approval or grid connection.

The UK needs domestic data centre capacity to support critical workloads that drive economic growth, deliver public services, and protect national security. That is why the Government has designated specific data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, recognising their importance to protecting essential workloads and national resilience. However, many data centres are co-location facilities that lease space to multiple tenants, or are cloud providers serving diverse customers. Developers often cannot confirm exact end uses when applying for relevant approvals, as these frequently change as tenants and workloads evolve.