A proposed 300MW datacentre on a landfill in Buckinghamshire has been given Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) status, in a move dubbed “anti-democratic” by environmental campaigners.
The site is at a Veolia-run site at Wapseys Wood near Gerards Cross, on which there is existing electricity generation from landfill gas of 7.5MW. The proposed development comprises three datacentre halls drawing 300MW plus a proposed further “energy centre” using landfill gas that the developer’s proposal suggests will provide “up to 900MW”.
Consent was given last week by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government to treat the site as one of national significance. That means the project can now go forward to apply for a Development Consent Order that will provide the final decision on whether it can go ahead. That process will take six months and is open to submissions from any interested party.
It was only from January 2026 that datacentres have been eligible to be admitted to the list of projects that can be considered of national interest. Such designation suits developers because it bypasses local planning, which can be mired in objections, and can speed the process by bundling together multiple related aspects of the planning process, including compulsory purchase, environmental permits and highway changes into a single piece of legislation.
Environmental campaign group Foxglove said the designation as NSIP allows the project to sidestep local planning and democracy, and is concerning because of its potential carbon emissions.
Foxglove head of communications Tom Hegarty said: “Every new datacentre comes at a serious environmental cost, but this one is simply staggering – an Elon Musk-style new gas-fired dirty site involving 300MW of power. Is the government seriously suggesting such a gigantic amount of new fossil-fuelled power, and new carbon emissions, should be pushed through in Buckinghamshire without local people having any say in the matter at all?”
The Wapseys Wood site – called the M40 Campus by the developer – would be the joint seventh largest datacentre in the UK by current measures. The M40 Campus would be only the second datacentre project in the south east of England to be in the top 10 largest in the UK.
Most of the biggest datacentres now being built are in the north of England and in Scotland where energy supplies are more plentiful and datacentre provision is less mature. The biggest currently proposed datacentre development is the 1GW Elsham Tech Park south of the River Humber in Lincolnshire. After that, the East Havering datacentre at 600MW is second largest currently in planning and construction, while most of the rest are in Scotland and the North East or the M62 corridor.
Foxglove also raised concerns that a draft national Policy Statement on datacentres was promised to set out the “policy framework for decision-making for datacentres” but that this has not been published yet.
Foxglove’s Hegarty said: “Ministers have handed datacentre developers this new power to bypass local democracy, but no proper indication of how they intend to use it. The National Policy Statement on datacentres was meant to be published by now, but ministers seem to have gone very quiet.
“This government’s datacentre mania is becoming dangerously undemocratic. They need to remember they are there to serve the interests of the public – not Big Tech billionaires.”
