The gray belt was made for Big Tech But Labour can’t explain why

It may not look like much, they say, but it’s good land. A hotchpotch of grassland and copse nestled between a secondary school and the M25, Bridgefoot is a tonic for the hundreds of Potters Bar residents who walk across it every week — a glorious refuge from working life that changes hue and character with every passing season. It is a place, says Fleur Albrecht, whose house abuts the land, where she can walk her dog and feel “100% safe”.

She may not feel safe for much longer. As early as 2027, her fields and hedgerows could be replaced by three huge new data centers, built to house the servers that process the services that make up our modern digital economy. Operated by Equinix, a multinational data center operator, this “Hertfordshire Campus” will sprawl over 85 acres and boast up to 250MW of computing power — roughly equivalent to the annual power usage of 200,000  homes.

But before that happens, Equinix and local councilors will have to contend with Albrecht. She is a founding member of the Potters Bar Special Interest Group Residents Association (SIGRA), an organization dedicated to keeping the data centers out. Nor is she alone. Similar anti-data center protests have erupted from Wiltshire to Watford to Buckinghamshire, with locals fearful that these buildings’ prodigious appetite for water and electricity will cause shortages in both; that they’ll be maddeningly noisy; that they’ll irretrievably alter the surrounding landscape.

Such objections coincide with an unprecedented surge in demand for digital services globally, with data center operators rushing to build new facilities to support our AI-powered future. In the UK alone, the next five years could see 100 new data centers, together estimated to cost some £45 billion. That’s a good thing, argues Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at the Britain Remade think tank. Leaving aside the fact that adding more data centers means we can all do more of the things they enable, the current industry boom is a vital boost for our sluggish economy.

For Dumitriu, places like Potters Bar are also opportunities to show what we can achieve if we shake up our sclerotic planning system. Dating back to the Forties, it was designed to prevent unplanned monstrosities like Slough. Irony of ironies, David Brent’s hometown is now Britain’s data center capital — even as a long list of nationally worthy projects are blocked or unnecessarily delayed by fist-waving Nimbys.

In principle, at least, the Labour government is behind reform. “Data centers are the engines of modern life,” tweeted then-technology secretary Peter Kyle in September 2024. Announcing that the facilities were now designated “Critical National Infrastructure”, he promised to afford them greater prestige within the UK’s planning system. Operators are also helped by changes in the National Planning Policy Framework, pushing councils to think about where data centers could go; for its part, the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) framework now provides a fast-track option for operators to get their project approved by a minister instead of the local council.

Is this bypassing of local communities justifiable? Dumitriu thinks so. The idea that projects of such national import can be blocked by a handful of residents and councils, sometimes for bizarre reasons — Dumitriu cites a case where a data center development was blocked because, among other reasons, it might be seen from motorway bridges — should be challenged. “A data center being approved in Potters Bar still actually matters to me, even if I don’t live anywhere near it,” he says, noting that it’s infrastructure he and millions of others depend on.

Short of fundamental planning reform, there are also opportunities to prove that communities can tangibly benefit from data centers. The Government could easily do that by allowing local authorities to retain more of the business rates generated by these sites, resulting in more money for roads, public transport and schools. Data center operators around the world also routinely invest in ecological regeneration, while fixing up abandoned industrial sites and developing heat-reuse schemes.

Whether with carrot or stick, there are literally billions of reasons for change. According to a 2024 report by industry association techUK, data centers contribute about £640 million to the Exchequer and £4.7 billion in gross value added to the UK economy. Those figures are expected to reach £9.7 billion and £44 billion respectively by 2035 — manna from heaven for a Treasury unable to boost national productivity or balance the books for two-and-a-half decades.

All these same, these benefits come with trade-offs. The total power consumption of the UK’s data center sector is expected to rise from 7% of total commercial demand to 30.4% by 2030 — which critics fear will push up energy bills as the National Grid passes on the cost of network upgrades to consumers. Though their water consumption is less of a worry, with most UK data center developers claiming their sites will rely on air-based cooling technologies, other projects have been accused of exacerbating flood risks and delaying housebuilding schemes.

They also tend to be ugly. Most resemble boxy warehouses, something that even enterprising architects struggle to change. The sustainability for AI data centers, if not their conventional counterparts, must also be questioned. Many of these sites sign multi-decade contracts for grid access. That, wrote IT expert Dominic Cooper last year, is a long time if AI turns out to be a bubble.

None of this has stopped the Government from offering its full-throated support to Equinix’s Hertfordshire Campus. The operator’s commitment of £3.9 billion to the project — roughly doubling its presence in the UK — was, to quote Kyle’s successor as technology secretary, Liz Kendall, a “huge vote of confidence in Britain”. As well as initially creating 2,700 temporary construction jobs, followed by at least 200 local, permanent operational roles, Equinix has said the project will also contribute an additional £18 million in business rates; £2 million in local transportation upgrades; improvements to local drainage systems; and a “10% Biodiversity Net Gain” in what was “low-grade arable land”.

Albrecht is skeptical about almost all of this. There’s nothing “low-grade” about the fields the campus will be built on, or the copse they believe it’ll destroy, which, SIGRA suspects, hosts a menagerie of jays, badgers, foxes and deer. The jobs created by the project, too, they speculate, probably won’t be for Potters Bar residents but for London-based engineers and security guards. The group also takes a dim view of Equinix’s claim that the site will be powered exclusively by renewable energy. That, they say, omits the fact that the backup power supply will be provided by large diesel generators, which need to be tested at least once a month for an hour: hardly good for the lungs of the students at the nearby Dame Alice Owen secondary school (Equinix, for its part, says that the generators meet “strict air quality requirements”).

That, of course, ignores the broader argument about the importance of data centers to Britain’s future — with digital services, AI bubble or not, contributing roughly £101 billion annually to the UK economy. Albrecht is hardly unaware of this contradiction. But what she doesn’t understand is why Equinix’s Hertfordshire Campus has to appear in their backyard. “What we’re objecting to is the fast-track destruction of the Green Belt, and what this actually means for anybody who feels that they have protected areas near them,” she says. “That doesn’t exist anymore.”

What it really comes down to, Albrecht argues, is the land. Viewed from above, Potters Bar resembles a gray spider’s web of housing developments surrounded by a viridescent halo of fields, a refuge that attracted many of the town’s residents from London in the first place. What the Hertfordshire Campus would do would puncture that ring in its southwest corner. This is now possible given the Government’s redesignation of certain parcels of land in the Green Belt as “Grey Belt”: in other words, lower-quality plots hosting wasteland, scrubland, and derelict structures that don’t contribute to the Green Belt’s core purpose of preventing urban sprawl. While such areas form only a tiny proportion of the overall Green Belt, itself only comprising 12.5% of all the land in England, its designation frees up space for development in places where demand is at its most acute. In practice, that largely means housing, schools, solar farms — and data centers.

But that shouldn’t apply in this case, argues Ros Naylor, a friend and colleague of Albrecht’s on SIGRA. Farmland it may be, but Bridgefoot acts as a psychological refuge for thousands of Potters Bar residents. It’s the very definition of Green Belt space, and for that reason, if nothing else, deserves protection. “Once you lose this, you know, it’s gone,” says Naylor. “It’s gone forever.” It’s hard not to sympathize with this argument, and this particular case — why the developers couldn’t have gone the extra mile to acquire land south of the M25, instead of near a local school, remains a mystery.

To be fair, Equinix has been open to answering the community’s concerns, publishing a comprehensive FAQs on its website about the new campus, sending out 12,000 leaflets to residents, and holding a town hall with locals. Perhaps most importantly, the operator won’t swallow up all the land. Fields and forest will be lost, to be sure, but paths will be laid, new trees planted, greenery preserved. “We’re at the beginning of a long-term presence in the area,” Equinix told UnHerd, “and we want to become a trusted partner over time by creating community initiatives that reflect local priorities, such as skills, sustainability and other community benefits.”

No matter how well-meaning, though, such concessions feel like they still risk talking past people like Albrecht, with cases like Potters Bar speaking as much to the pervasive inequities of our countryside as they do to the failings of the planning system. Our green and pleasant land is, contrary to popular myths, one that’s mostly fenced off. Albrecht and Naylor may have been able to traverse Bridgefoot freely, but only at the landowner’s behest. SIGRA would have spent much more time arguing about land reform instead of data centers, one suspects, if, as in Scotland, a serious community right to buy existed in England.

That isn’t likely to happen any time soon. In part, this is thanks to our national myth-making about the countryside itself. As Guy Shrubsole explains in his book on the subject, the bucolic idyll of fields, forests and meadows that form our collective impression of rural life is, in fact, a patchwork of private farms starved of biodiversity. We also happen to be among the least-connected nations on Earth to nature, something that might change if we could start thinking more deeply about how Britain’s land should actually be used — including how we can preserve Bridgefoot and other genuine green spaces.

That also requires a more robust and transparent debate on the necessity of new developments, whether new houses, roads, or power plants. Inevitably, all of these will have to be plonked in places with ample space, but still close to service major population centers — in other words places like Potters Bar. But what that’ll never involve is the simple railroading of the people who live nearby. The Green Belt is being nibbled at, not abolished; nobody, not even the most radical Yimbys, would like to see our countryside transformed into a British Randstad. As one planning law expert tells me, even those recent reforms allowing mega-projects to be fast-tracked by ministers offer plenty of scope for groups like SIGRA to object.

The problem is, Government isn’t making these arguments forcefully enough — a dangerous thing if it’s to prevent a future Conservative or Reform ministry from reimposing planning restrictions to appease rural voters, much as the Tories did for onshore wind farms. Yet just as it lacks a grand narrative for why it wants to run the country in the first place, Labour has failed to tell a story about why server barns should sit in the countryside, instead feeling content to cheerlead investment projects from the sidelines and make abstract pronouncements about how AI will somehow deliver national renewal. The same goes for housing, targets which it will fail to meet this year; the nine new reservoirs it plans to dig; and its support for the expansion of Manchester, Glasgow and Heathrow airports.

Stories are powerful, inspirational things, and one from our government about the signal virtues of building back better could make everyone more invested in how land should be used for the benefit of everyone — instead of how it must be protected against absolutely everything. At the very least, it would stick a spoke in the endless cycle of stories about disenfranchised rural-facing communities with sad-sounding “time-will-tell” conclusions (the ranks of which this article will now join.) A pity, then, that all we can expect for the moment are the same-old government comms, even as our finest political journalists seem too distracted by meaningless bubble gossip to diagnose the wider ills of this country, much less grasp why groups like SIGRA feel so threatened.

And so, reform without rationalization breeds resentment. Albrecht and Naylor are well-versed in all the arguments for more development everywhere, and even acknowledge the small hypocrisies that come with opposing them — Albrecht herself lives in a Seventies housing estate that, once, was another green field. Even then, this still feels like a David and Goliath contest, the little guys versus the monied elite, a wholesome good against an abstract bad unmoored by the nuances of national need. “We’ve been driven down a route, so we don’t have a choice,” says Naylor. “We’ve been told we should have AI and that we all need AI because it makes a lot of money. But do we really need it?”

In the end, flooded paths mean we’re unable to walk across the site earmarked for the campus, forced instead to glimpse the sodden fields from the confines of South Mimms service station. Home to two Starbucks, a KFC and toilets, it was only built in 1986, while Potters Bar itself, though centuries older, contains precious few buildings from before the First World War. Perhaps, then, the arrival of vast, thrumming server barns to green fields is inevitable, much like the sewage plants, solar farms and landfills that make life in the countryside possible.

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