I found out, from a neighbour, that an AI data centre is going up on the edge of my village. Not from anyone who's meant to tell me these things. No letter, no knock on the door, no chance to say what I thought before it was already agreed.

An AI data centre could be approved near you too, using your water, keeping you up at night, and creating a fraction of the local jobs its developers promised, a typical large data centre runs on a permanent staff of a few dozen, however big the site or the price tag. You might not find out any of this until the diggers turn up.

Since January this year, under the Infrastructure Planning (Business or Commercial Projects) (Amendment) Regulations 2026, big data centre developments can bypass local councils altogether. The decision goes straight to Whitehall. That's because government designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure and gave them a fast track through the planning system, the same status given to roads, railways and power stations. And at the same time, government scrapped the one formal consultation step that used to come with that fast track route.

That's not a technicality. In Buckinghamshire, a council said no to a data centre on protected land. The Secretary of State overruled them and said yes anyway. In Essex, a council was pushed to approve a scheme after a minister wrote directly to the chief executive. Communities like mine are being told what's happening to our water, our sleep, our streets, after the decision's already made.

And it's not just people like me. Electricians, HV engineers, general labourers, the people actually building these sites, are under the same pressure to move fast and stay quiet. Nobody's asked them either, not about the pace, not about the safety trade offs, not about anything.