Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what plans the Government has to support the increase of data centre capacity in the UK.

The UK’s data centre industry is a highly successful sector that will play an important role in our ambition to grow the digital sector’s contribution to the UK economy to £200 billion by 2025.

In 2016 we appointed the UK’s first National Technology Advisor to work with the Digital Economy Unit, part of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport, to strengthen links with technology sector, including the data centre industry. This role includes working with companies such as IBM to make the UK their expansion country of choice. In November 2016, IBM announced that it will be opening four new cloud data centres in the UK.

The government is also working with data centre operators to ensure a secure future energy supply, which will support the continued growth of the UK data centre industry.