UK data centres now have a ministerial bypass for local planning. The qualifying rules do not exist yet.

The UK government has built data centres a special door out of local planning. The route is opt-in: developers apply for "national significance" status, swap a local council decision for a single ministerial order, and shed up to a year off the approval timeline (TechRadar). The test for who qualifies has yet to be written.

The change is the Infrastructure Planning (Business or Commercial Projects) (Amendment) Regulations 2025, a statutory instrument in force this autumn. It opens section 35 of the Planning Act 2008 to data centres for the first time. Under that section, the Secretary of State can direct that a project be treated as Nationally Significant Infrastructure if it meets statutory tests on size, location, and economic significance. The amendment gives ministers that power over data centres (Data Centre Review). Qualifying developments avoid separate local authority planning and building regulation consent and receive a single Development Consent Order from Whitehall instead. The instrument also scraps the statutory pre-application consultation NSIP projects normally have to run, which planning lawyers identify as where most of the saved year actually lives (Pinsent Masons). That consultation is the period where parish councils, statutory consultees, and objectors can require changes before examination begins.

A developer files under section 35 and the Secretary of State has to decide whether the project meets a "national significance" test that does not yet exist on paper. In a written statement on 15 October, housing minister Matthew Pennycook told MPs that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, or DSIT, is drafting a data-centre-specific National Policy Statement to set that test (DSIT AI Growth Zones; TechUK briefing). Once published, that statement will set the criteria every section 35 filing now waits on. Until it lands, every application is judged against criteria ministers are still negotiating with themselves. A council cannot block a project that has cleared Whitehall, but Whitehall can also pick which projects it wants to fast-track.

The government frames this as economic strategy rather than deregulation. It wants data centres concentrated in "AI Growth Zones" tied to regional cyber hubs, with Cheltenham near GCHQ cited as the flagship (AI Growth Zones). The Cheltenham site sits a few miles from GCHQ, the UK's signals intelligence headquarters, and already has the fibre and grid connections a hyperscale tenant would need. Compute is treated as critical national infrastructure, and Whitehall is using the bypass to pull the sovereign AI capacity that frontier model developers say they need. Trade press frames the move as a response to a queue of projects that local planning had been slow to clear (Data Center Dynamics).

Tom's Hardware reported that eligible projects could save more than a billion dollars in NIMBY fights (Tom's Hardware). The figure does not appear in the legislation, in Pennycook's statement, or in any published government cost note. It rests on a single secondary source and is best treated as an estimate until a trade body, minister, or operator publishes a basis. The instrument is a developer choice, not an automatic entitlement, which is why the claim sits on a thin evidentiary base.

The next test is concrete: DSIT will publish the National Policy Statement, and that document sets the criteria every developer is now filing against. The forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill is expected to add further streamlining (TechUK). Developers applying now are betting that the statement, when it lands, will be written to fit their projects rather than gatekeep them.