Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to reduce planning restrictions on the construction of AI data centres.

The National Planning Policy Framework sets out that planning policies should pay particular regard to facilitating development to meet the needs of a modern economy, including by identifying suitable locations for uses such as data centres.

We laid the draft Infrastructure Planning (Business or Commercial Projects) (Amendment) Regulations in Parliament on 15 October which, if approved, will enable developers of certain proposed data centres on request to ‘opt in’ to the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects consenting regime. To support this change, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology will prepare a new National Policy Statement for data centres which will set out the national policy for this sector and the policy framework for decision-making for data centre developments under that regime.

We are exploring whether further measures may be appropriate to support the delivery of AI infrastructure and will engage with the sector on this.